The City Council candidates are playing doubleheaders now. Fifteen hours after finishing last night’s League of Women Voters forum in Council Chambers, they packed their bags and headed for the Radisson Hotel and a luncheon date early this afternoon.
Even Frances Talbot White made a return appearance, this time as the moderator.
Only six of the candidates were able to double back for the forum co-sponsored by the Rotary Club and the Exchange Club.
Cary Anderson and Randy Scott Leslie called in with scheduling conflicts, and Gary Russell, who routinely has missed lately, was absent once again.
Now About Those Answers
Some responses — read platitudes — are wearing thin. Favored talking points keep turning up regularly in answers, regardless of the question.
A refreshingly rare breeze blew through the second story setting at the Radisson when half of the candidates at the table, elevated onto a platform, admitted for the first time that certain questions stumped them. Previously, they had used creative language to disguise their lack of knowledge.
The extraneous information spoken by the candidates at the Radisson might have flooded Texas.
If strong answers had been food, a number of club members in the room would have gone hungry.
For example:
In Southern California, it is not unusual for police officers and firefighters to live far away, and so the question was posed: How would you encourage them to live in Culver City?
Andy Weissman showed why he is the favorite in the race for three open seats on April 8 , giving a typically solid, textbook answer.
“The issue of housing in general is one the city needs to confront,” he said. “We have cumulative traffic impacts — traffic from our developments, traffic from Los Angeles developments. Affordable housing, in most instances, requires dense projects. The city has recently revised its mixed use ordinance to reduce the density from 65 housing units per acre down to 35. With appropriate community benefits incentive, a development may be able to get as high as 50 units. The recognition needs to be that we need dense projects in order to provide affordable housing. Unfortunately, dense projects mean more traffic. So we’ve got the tension between the need for housing and the reality of the burdens that the housing is going to bring. If we can provide a project that offers jobs, housing, shopping and entertainment all within walking distance so that people will get out of their cars, that’s beneficial. Otherwise, we are merely going to increase the traffic burden we already have.”
This compact 162-word answer could be studied by the other candidates for its economy, pragmatism and comprehensiveness whose meaning could be understood by a builder or a novice.
Lacking even a remote and thin solution, the next candidate merely vamped.
“What a wonderful concept, to have our police force, as many of them working here and living here in Culver City.”
This opening suggested the candidate was lost.
“Partly, it is a trend of not living in the city they serve. The other part of it is affordability. Culver City is very expensive to live in. I would love to be able to work with future development projects somehow to provide incentives to offer to our police officers if they are willing to live here in Culver City. Because that would be wonderful, to have more and more of our officers living here in Culver City.”
The candidate’s conclusion proved the opening suspicion was correct.
