City Councilman Gary Silbiger’s bizarre rhetorical thrust into history officially ended, ingloriously, around 10 o’clock last night in Council Chambers.
Less than 24 hours after blockily and grumpily curving into an unprecedented filibuster that was intended to bulldog a controversial building project past a City Council whom he hoped would be dazed and befuddled by his unanticipated maneuver, the ever unpopular Mr. Silbiger was stopped.
Both he and the side he was unapologetically taking were thoroughly defeated.
With a flash of perceived gallantry, Mr. Silbiger, a champion of populist causes and icon to a noisy, fiercely loyal, militant band in Culver City, saw himself as riding to the rescue, alone, of infuriated protestors from the Westchester Bluffs and a lighter sprinkling of hometown residents.
His intent was to deflect a vote on the hot populist topic of the moment — the proposed 190-foot Entrada Office Tower, which he opposed — until a new three-person City Council majority could be seated a week from Monday, April 28, when he was convinced he would gain three certain allies.
Decorum Goes South
As Mr. Silbiger’s increasingly thorn-tipped questions were presented to beleaguered but cooperative city staff droned on for the second evening in a row — before a sizable, dumbfounded public audience — Council Chambers took on the air of the town square in front of the Culver Hotel.
So many officials on the move.
To brazenly display — if not flaunt — their disgust over Mr. Silbiger’s meandering filibustering, Council members scattered. While they did not desert the dais en masse, separately they wandered off, as if out for a stroll through a park. They consulted with each other and with staffers, especially the legal pillar of City Hall, City Atty. Carol Schwab, the maven of the moment, and her deputy, Heather Iker.
How could they break through and throttle their colleague?
“This must have looked awful,” Mayor Alan Corlin said afterward. “This is one of the worst meetings I have ever presided over.
“It is a shame that 8 years into the experience of Steve, Carol and me on the Council, we have to embark on a path of obstruction rather than conciliation.”
Sources told the newspaper that if Mr. Silbiger had responded to signals sent to him at both meetings by more sympathetic colleagues, the net outcome would have been altered.
Lesson Learned
After unexpectedly being forced to answer obscure questions slowly doled out by Mr. Silbiger during the last 70 minutes of Monday’s overnight meeting, staffers learned their lesson for Tuesday’s adjourned session. They came armed with the venerable Robert’s Rules of Order, committed to finding an escape route through the labrynthian theoretical thicket that Mr. Silbiger had challenged them — and the leadership of the city — with.
Mr. Silbiger’s clumsily executed filibuster was smothered by two planned technicalities, a parliamentary intervention authored by Councilman Steve Rose, which followed an earlier call by Vice Mayor Carol Gross, which set a train of events into action.
Subsequently, wreckage, from Mr. Silbiger’s standpoint, accumulated swiftly.
Not only was the first known filibuster in Culver City’s 90-year history energetically beaten back — in the fourth hour of the second straight night of meetings — the gigantic Entrada Office Tower proposal that Mr. Silbiger was protesting, shook off a brush with adversity and won strong approval from the rest of the City Council.
The Turnaround
With the outflanked Mr. Silbiger stubbornly refusing to participate with his colleagues, the Council approved a voluminous draft environmental impact report 4 to 0, the pivotal document, and more narrowly approved all other aspects of the project in a southern Culver City commercial area, across the street from angered Westchester residents.
Barring informally threatened legal roadblocks, the 12-story glass and steel tower, undergirded by a massive parking structure, above and below ground, will be built adjacent to the Radisson Hotel.
All four of Mr. Silbiger’s colleagues — three of whom have served with him throughout his six years on the Council — regard him routinely as an obstructionist.
This pervasive resentment further soured a rhetorical gimmick that forced Council members, staff and other officials to meet for a record 8 1/2 hours Monday night, until nearly 3:30 on Tuesday morning, sleep fast, run to their day jobs, and then re-convene at 6 last evening in Council Chambers for between 3 and 4 more hours, until the strategy to effectively collar their colleague finally was pulled off.
In all, the iconoclastic Mr. Silbiger held the floor for 4 hours and 10 minutes in a spectacular delaying tactic hardly ever deployed outside of large legislative centers across the land.
What distinguished last night’s adjunct 6-hour session from the elongated yawner the night before was that the majority that disagreed with Mr. Silbiger’s viewpoint and “performance” persisted and came up with a winning strategy.
But not before Mr. Silbiger’s strategy made progress, and gave signs of working for an unknown length of time, even though it appeared that the Councilman and his advisors were stitching together their game-plan moment to moment, instead of relying on a mapped-out vision.
One moment bound to be tattooed onto the memory of participants occurred a little more into last night when Mr. Corlin, exasperated by Mr. Silbiger for about the 150th time, called what appeared to be a sympathetic recess.
A Piece of Evidence
At the outset of the time-out, Tom Camarella, highly regarded as a political strategist and a valued confidante of the Councilman, optimistically approached Mr. Silbiger. He was clutching maps purported to be crucial.
Later from the dais, with descriptive help from Community Development Director Sol Blumenfeld, Mr. Silbiger worriedly declared he had discovered critical, possibly life-threatening information regarding potential deposits of methane gas near the Entrada project site.
The longer he spoke, the more shrill he became, the more he grew aroused. He expressed certitude this find should lead to an immediate investigation — read delay, his main objective.
Origin of the Species
But colleagues soon began questioning the authenticity of the several maps. Mr. Silbiger did not know their origin, but he was confident they were the genuine article from the city of Los Angeles Engineering Dept.
Mr. Rose, among others, challenged their authenticity, origin and whether they were current.
Invited to the speaker podium, Mr. Camarella acknowledged he had Googled them, and from there the terrain grew rougher for Mr. Silbiger.
Somewhat triumphantly, Mr. Rose pointed out later that the maps were produced during the Los Angeles city administration of Jimmy Hahn. He has not been mayor for awhile.
