Once more for the scrapbook, for old times’ sake.
The most familiar faceoff at City Council meetings the last four years has been Meghan Sahli-Wells vs. her four gentlemen colleagues.
They must have squared off a hundred times. Often it was over arcane issues that she felt strongly about, matters where she was a lonely but stout minority of one.
While termed-out Mayor Mehaul O’Leary and Vice Mayor Andy Weissman momentarily stood in the background at their final business meeting, Ms. Sahli-Wells fought valiantly but fruitlessly to stave off the latest decision on the housing project at 4043 Irving Pl.
Across the last four years, Ms. Sahli-Wells has shifted from a supporting stance to unbending opposition.
On a technicality, she fought to delay a vote until after the reconstituted City Council – with at least two new members – is seated.
She announced that she had not received a copy of the final staff report last Friday night regarding 4043 Irving while the other four Council members had.
She maintained she would not be comfortable casting a vote when she had not digested the staff report.
At stake was a fairly obscure financing matter for 4043 – an agreement that allows developer Sal Gonzalez to pay the city the net present value of the city loan on 4043. The agreement holds that if the developer sells or refinances 4043 within five years, the city will be paid its loan balance. Meanwhile, all affordability covenants remain in place.
No doubt anticipating the outcome of her plea and the final score on the dais, Ms. Sahli-Wells plunged ahead. She requested a postponement. Perhaps she hoped the April 12 election would assure her return to the Council along with two friendlier new colleagues.
It was not to be.
Mr. Weissman successfully quashed her argument in case any of the other three Councilmen were pondering surrender. He insisted that all present Council members had been exposed to an exhausting amount of familiarity with all dimensions of 4043.
He said that aspects of 4043 Irving Pl. have been debated thoroughly, drainingly by the Council across six years. As one of the last major projects of the Redevelopment Agency before Gov. Brown shut down the agencies statewide, 4043 is a model of affordable housing, 12 of the 28 units – 42 percent — being in the affordable category.
Given the hundreds of hours that city staff and Council members have devoted to this single project, it would be at least wasteful to leave the matter for a 40 to 60 percent new Council that would need to retrace steps back to the virgin beginning and start over, Mr. Weissman said.
One by one, Councilmen Jeff Cooper, Jim Clarke and Mayor O’Leary assented question to Mr. Weissman’s contentions.
With Ms. Sahli-Wells abstaining, her colleagues voted unanimously to endorse the staff report.
Elsewhere
By 5-0, the Council approved bonus incentives and other conditions for a proposed three-story apartment building at 4025 Grand View Blvd.
Public Works Director Charles Herbertson’s Urban Forest Master Plan for tree-planting across the city also was unanimously supported.
Once again we see the courageous councilwoman Meghan Sahli-Wells castigated for standing up for Culver City residents in the face of overwhelming opposition from Chamber-of-Commerce controlled council men. I hope that Culver City residents will return her (and elect the like-minded candidates Lee and Small) to the new city council. It is time to throw off the influence of the Chamber over city government.