What looked like a yawner agenda item at Monday night’s City Council meeting soon enough overheated and soared to such a torrid temperature it would have scorched your fingernails.
The subject was broad, amorphous and seemingly dry.
But when it was peeled down to its core, the stormy debate that broke out revolved around the question of whether the Chamber of Commerce’s decade and a half association with the Mayor’s Luncheon should be allowed to continue unimpeded.
When two hours of dueling ended, Steve Rose, one of the best-known personalities in the community, leveled charges likely to redden faces.
To start at the beginning:
About a year ago, the City Council pledged to clear up years of casual bookkeeping.
Time to Modernize
For the first time, the Council would formally scrutinize, update, clean up and apply a professional sheen to long-running relationships with certain community non-profit organizations.
“Streamlining the process,” they called it.
Traditionally, the Chamber and other groups, such as Sister Cities and the Historical Society, had been doing business with City Hall on a case-by-case basis instead of working from a legalized template.
Generally, both the community group and City Hall had taken their partnership for granted for decades.
In the light of this low-key but persistent probing, the relationship between group and City Hall would not necessarily change. It merely would become formalized. The handshake that a previous generation of leaders agreed upon now would become official and binding.
The memorandum of understanding that the Council was asked to approve covered five separate events the Chamber of Commerce, in conjunction with the city, stages, sponsors, manages and/r pays for.
Possible Motivation
The only Chamber-affiliated event that drew heat was the Mayor’s Luncheon, possibly because Vice Mayor Gary Silbiger expects to be voted into the Mayor’s chair a week from Monday for his final year in office before he is term-limited.
The Chamber has managed the Mayor’s Luncheon for about half of its 29-year history. “We took full financial responsibility for the luncheon this year for the first time,” said Mr. Rose, CEO of the business group for 22 years.
That meant that the Chamber footed the $4,000 bill to stage the event and covered the rental fee of $1,352 at the Vets Auditorium.
“This way, the city actually had a positive cash flow on the luncheon rather than losing money,” said Mr. Rose. He estimated the rearranged role will net the Chamber a pocket-sized profit of about $1,000.
No matter how quiescent the rubber stamp-like item seemed to others on Monday night, Mr. Rose walked into a buzzsaw, and he said he was prepared for it.
Three persons, all allies — two members of the City Council, Mr. Silbiger and Christopher Armenta, plus the activist Tom Camarella — vigorously objected to what they regarded as a seamless, not necessarily earned, permanent handover of control of the Mayor’s Luncheon to the Chamber of Commerce.
“All of a sudden,” Mr. Rose recalled, “the three of them were saying that the Mayor’s Luncheon should be put out to bid. At least that is what they said.”
Reflecting later, Mr. Rose, a former City Councilman, charged that the three intended, in a personal way, to inflict a setback on him and held and commanded a separate agenda.
“In two previous elections, when those three ran against me at different times,” he said, “I beat them.
“Like a trained professional boxer, I took the body blows.
“And the Chamber, by a 4 to 1 Council vote, walked out with, basically, the same memorandum of understanding we walked in with.”
Mr. Silbiger eventually changed his position on Chamber sponsorship. But Mr. Arementa did not, and that brought about the 4 to 1 vote.
