This is Closing Day for Interim City Manager Lamont Ewell.
He will return briefly into retirement tomorrow morning, and then he and Mrs. E will wing away for a holiday following 120 grinding, prolific, productive days in Culver City.
Rather unexpectedly, Mr. Ewell and the community may have fallen in love with each other while he was serving as a bridge between Mark Scott, who was effective but left blindingly fast, and John Nachbar, who starts two weeks from Monday.
What was most impressive about Mr. Ewell was that he solved daunting problems while looking as if he were leaning back studying a newspaper.
A budget deficit in early spring that almost sounded like bridge-jumping time was cured a effortlessly as if he were teaching a fish how to swim.
In an intensely related issue, Mr. Ewell reeled in prodigal son Jeff Muir, Culver City’s valued once and future Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Muir briefly left City Hall last November to return to his old desk in Inglewood. But when the leader of the city descended into a jailbird, he and Culver City began eying each other again.
Talks dragged along for weeks until Mr. Ewell came to town on April 1 and reeled in Mr. Muir a few minutes later.
There was an amount of disarray at Cit Hall on that date because the abrupt and final departure of Mr. Scott hobbled City Hall and employee morale.
Quietly, firmly, Mr. Ewell, who might have been expected to be a placeholder, instead engineered the equivalent of turning around a battleship in a bathtub.
He will be missed as much as a cross-country bus driver who stops the bus in the Ozarks, opens the door and wordlessly takes a powder, leaving passengers dazed.
But in his closing days, there were disappointments.
At last Monday’s City Council meeting, Mr. Ewell was hoping to retool the guidelines under which arguably the most crucial lay panel, the Civil Service Commission, operates.
He wanted the reworked regulations in place before he left.
Instead, he had to settle for half a loaf, streamlining the adjusted rules for three other commissions, but being forced to leave the Civil Service relationship with the City Manager ie until Mr. Nachbar takes over.
“Despite the fact some may have assumed I had an interest in what the structure would be, the only interest I had was in moving forward,” Mr. Ewell said.
(To be concluded Friday)
