Smithereens was back in the news last evening.
As in the easy-breathing presumption that the City Council almost automatically would forward four proposed charter amendments to the Nov. 8 ballot. That premature and erroneous feeling was blown to you-know-what.
Along with the never-in-doubt stormwater parcel tax, the divided Council, with flattened enthusiasm, voted to forward only one amendment to the ballot.
Voters will be asked to decide whether to transfer hiring, firing and supervisorial authority over the police chief and fire chief from the City Council to City Manager John Nachbar.
In light of last week’s police-involved shootings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana, Meghan Sahli-Wells, the Council’s undoubted progressive leader, strenuously opposed altering Culver City’s long established policy of the Council being in charge.
The contention of supporters that assigning hiring/firing power to the city manager is the norm in “98 percent” of city manager-governed cities nationwide did not budge Ms. Sahli-Wells’s side.
As for the stormwater parcel tax, Culver City needs to raise money to uphold its portion of a countywide regulation aiming to purify waters. The remarkably expensive rule, initially costing $125 million, can be fractionally underwritten with a parcel tax. Hewing to the outcome of a polling survey, the proposed parcel tax calls for a $99 assessment for single families, $69 for multi-family buildings, and $1,092 per non-residential acre. If the city has not complied by 2021, said Public Works Director Charles Herbertson, a $10,000 a day penalty may be imposed.
Citizen Oversight Board
Meanwhile, along with numerous public voices from the progressive Culver City Community Coalition, Ms. Sahli-Wells not only opposed advancing/changing the amendment, she strenuously advocated a citizen-based oversight commission to bird dog the Police Dept.
Just in case.
In the 3-2 vote, Ms. Sahli-Wells was joined in opposition by Thomas Small.
Ultimately, it appeared that the only reason the transfer of power amendment made the ballot was expediency. By law, it only could be voted on in the year of a statewide election. The next opportunity, June 2018, was deemed too far off.
Ms. Sahli-Wells and Community Coalition members were stonily firm in their vigilance convictions that what happened in Baton Rouge and a St. Paul suburb could leak into Culver City. For the Council to surrender control would be not only devastating but foolish, Ms. Sahli-Wells suggested.
She saw “no pressing need” to advance any of the four charter amendments that the previous Council confidently had recommended as one of its final acts.
Indeed, Andy Weissman, a prominent member of that Council, was a commenting member of the public and also was summoned from the audience to explain the reasoning of his ex-colleagues.
A proposed amendment widening term limits from eight years to 12 was the second high-profile target of Ms. Sahli-Wells and Community Coalition speakers.
Their central (and most successful) argument was the blossoming of diversity, progressives’ headline value. In a quarter-century of limiting Council members to two terms, each of them contended that regular turnover of members was responsible for electing the first Latino, the first Asian and three women have been elected to the dais.
The other two failed amendments that were dismissed:
- If a member resigned during his term, he would be forced to sit out four years from the date of his quitting, and
- Council would be permitted to schedule meetings as (in)frequently as it wished, overriding the present rule of meeting twice a month.
