In a most unorthodox manner, a film of serenity has arrived to float over normally tendentious City Hall this morning.
It is in specific honor of tonight’s 7 o’clock City Council meeting.
Even when tardy, peace is appreciated.
Thirteen months after a troika of newly elected City Council members promised to strangle to death the constancy of infighting on the dais, apparently peace in our time is ready to break out.
The final item on a succinct and dryly routine agenda calls for the typically last-seen-quarreling five warriors of the Council to conduct a fairly civil conversation over the future annual in-house elections of the Mayor and Vice Mayor.
If you are a fan of this Council, or at least a spectator, you would presume that the still-fuming Councilman Gary Silbiger, the once but definitely not future Mayor, probably demanded that his colleagues review procedures.
Perhaps, you might theorize, he was trying to spare a future member from enduring the kind of scripted embarrassment and tantrum-throwing he pulled off last month when his colleagues unanimously rejected his bid to advance from Vice Mayor to Mayor.
This would be wrong.
Remember, a new era of peace has stomped through the front door of City Hall.
The call to explore guidelines for choosing the city’s top two — albeit, technically ceremonial — officers developed during a private, off-stage consultation between the new Mayor, Andy Weissman, and the new Vice Mayor, Chris Armenta.
Sharp Change in Direction
That the Mayor and Vice Mayor would share a huddle is news in Culver City.
Past leadership teams typically were not buddies of the bosom or otherwise. They might agree to ride on the same train, as long as they did not have to share a car or see each other.
Mr. Weissman was elected Mayor over Mr. Silbiger principally, it appears, out of the sheer respect his colleagues hold for his considerable political and human attributes. Mr. Armenta, though less experienced, is regarded as a potential youthful version of this model.
Neither Council member is believed to be prepared to come to the dais armed with a grand strategy for overhauling the loose-knit, informal and — critically — unwritten system determining succession.
They are said to be mainly interested in pre-empting the kind of embarrassing blowup that marked Mr. Silbiger’s supposedly undreamed of defeat on April 27.
