Launched by a scholarly disquisition eloquently delivered by Commissioner John Kuechle on his 36th wedding anniversary, the Planning Commission last night narrowly rejected a florid expansion bid by The Help Group, a school for special students on Washington Boulevard.
Whether the 3-to-2 vote is a hiccup or an insurmountable wall for the network of continuation schools will become evident later this summer when the City Council takes charge of the matter.
In multiple appearances before the advisory commission, the exasperated Help Group has encountered an equally frustrated and divided Planning Commission.
Throughout the spring, as The Help Group treated its petition like a sheet of damp puddy – contracting and reshaping its petition where it was deemed strategic to gain approval – four of the votes seemed consistent:
The Breakdown
Vice Chair Scott Wyant and Mr. Kuechle were disinclined to green light the widening and thickening of the school for a half-dozen reasons. Marcus Tiggs – whose term expired at the end of last evening– and Chair Tony Pleskow were supportive.
This left Linda Smith Frost as the swing vote.
Besides the telling vote and the departure of the popular Mr. Tiggs, the sparsely attended meeting in Council Chambers may have been historic. It took the form of a teleconference – possibly the first in Culver City history. The traveling Mr. Pleskow, an architect, was participating by telephone from a hotel in Kentucky. Last week’s regularly scheduled meeting already had been postponed because of Mr. Pleskow’s unavailability. It was a half-hour before midnight, his time, when the Commission finally adjourned. Despite a couple of electronic advances in the last 50 years, the telephone call at times resembled a recreation of Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic in 1927.
While the standard reasons for expansion rejection were ever present – a sharp uptick in traffic and enhanced noise for the neighbors –three other actions by The Help Group pointedly irritated Mr. Kuechle and were pivotal in the outcome. In ascending order:
Where the Petition Failed
- As the Group’s bid package became increasingly fungible, the sudden and seemingly curiously timed adjustments appeared to have been made on the fly minus necessary corroborating evidence;
- The possibly creeping usage of Culver City services by non-residents in a non-taxing situation endlessly irritated Mr. Kuechle as did the Group’s belated attempt to mollify him by offering a $14,650 annual payment covering the price of emergency services and business taxes.
- Finally, the most painful burr beneath Mr. Kuechle’s saddle was the Group’s alleged deceptiveness – although he never used such a term – regarding the expansion of its student body. He called it “incremental planning.” It seems that when the Group filed its original petition a dozen years, for a 400-student school, it had in mind all along an intention to grow to 650. But in their environmentally sensitive pleading at the time, 650 never was mentioned, likely, it was speculated, because the Group feared that would be a deal-squasher. In conclusion, Mr. Kuechle felt the constant massaging of their bid by The Help Group was irretrievably offputting.
Alluding to the latest paint job applied atop The Help Group’s very final attempt, Mr. Kuechle provided a window of insight to his thinking:
“Following what appears to be their standard strategy, The Help Group did the same thing they did a month ago, making a completely new offer after staff had completed their report for an upcoming meeting, thereby insuring that the details of the offer would not be carefully analyzed. While I cannot definitively say their proposal is a bad deal for the city, none of us has enough information to conclude, with certainty, it is a good deal. The bottom line is that staff needs to be given the time to carefully consider the proposal, negotiate with The Help Group over potential alternatives, and then recommend a carefully considered course of action. We must not allow The Help Group’s strategy of withholding their offers until the 12th hour to make us feel pressured to race to accept a proposal before it has been fully analyzed.”
