[For background on the state of Culver City’s embryonic animal control program, see City Manager Jerry Fulwood’s report to the City Council at the end of this story.]
News item: Responding to a City Council request, a County official confirmed yesterday that on-duty animal control officers patrolling Culver City will, when appropriate, be ordered to deliver animals to a privately operated shelter in Hawthorne instead of exclusively to the County facility in Carson. Uncertainty over whether the County would agree to transport some, but not all, Culver City animals to a so-called rival shelter was a major sticking point in last Monday’s City Council meeting in the Council’s ongoing attempt to cobble together its own independent animal control program under a two-year pilot plan.
Normally, you would expect that Vice Mayor Gary Silbiger and Councilmember Chris Armenta, who are driving the animal shelter program at breakneck speeds, would be the most relieved persons inside of City Hall to receive this breathlessly awaited news.
This may be the first time that “normally” and Mr. Silbiger’s name appeared in the same sentence. Shut my mouth, though, if you see me reaching for the word “courage.”
To the criticism of nearly everyone I could find, Mr. Silbiger and Mr. Armenta prematurely brought two aspects of the unborn animal control program before the City Council this week. One was for an alternative shelter, the other for a “temporary” shelter in Culver City Park, a plan so poorly formed that it looked as if it had been thought up by an unborn child. Neither gentlemen had an answer for his three colleagues who wanted to know what the rush was. “The people demand and need this program now, tonight, not next week,” they kept saying.
Common sense, scarcely in evidence among the very select crowd promoting an expensive animal control program, made a brief appearance when City Manager Jerry Fulwood convinced them to forego what may have been an embarrassing discussion of the “temporary” shelter. Even sympathetic Councilman Mehaul O’Leary described it as “a mess.”
Is it time to elect new Council members yet?
Mr. Silbiger’s insufferably selfish, feckless, hardheaded brand of playing politics has been on display nearly every week since a 60 percent new City Council was seated last April. He wears his image as an undisciplined, one-track rebel as if it were a compliment. With less than two years remaining until he is term-limited, he remains the same green politician he was in the beginning — uncompromising, uncaring, unprepared, unschooled.
Ready, Aim, Misfire
Sometimes the Vice Mayor reminds me of Western movies I saw as a kid. The scene is a dusty street in front of the town jail. And there stands a bravado-belching cowboy, wildly gesticulating, making outrageous threats — but, instructively, only as long as there is a bully-boy mob behind him.
Alone in a room, he might melt into a damp napkin. But by golly when the mob is there to back him up, he acts like a white-hatted hero, wrenching every sweaty drop out of their presence.
Typical of many populist politicians, Mr. Silbiger deployed one of his favorite weapons, Mob Rule, as a billyclub to beat his City Council colleagues into submission at this week’s Council meeting. Most of his unique, emotion-driven, reason-free, half-cooked ideas require a heavy dose of perfume before being trotted out to the public, and that is where Mob Rule comes in. By golly, Mr. Silbiger and the group Friends of Culver City Animals make a powerhouse team. However , one without the other might be a weaker story.
After six years in office, Mr. Silbiger performs like Horowitz at the piano when pre-arranged mobs storm into Council Chambers.
Details Are Icky
As one-half of the hellbent Council subcommittee responsible for organizing an animal control program that works, Mr. Silbiger is acting once again as if reflectiveness is his deadly enemy. He hates process, hates following rules that apply to the rest of us earthlings.
For reasons that elude sensible people, Mr. Silbiger, from the evidence, has arrogated unto himself the sole responsibility for halfheartedly developing an animal control program far more complicated than the Vice Mayor realizes or is willing to acknowledge. Preparation of the program requires a grownup with patience, and on this score, City Hall has gone oh-for-2.
Deborah Weinrauch of Friends of the Animals said last Monday that her group has spent eight years trying to convince City Hall that an animal control officer — plus a hundred related, expensive, unresearched, unacknowledged trimmings — is desperately needed.
Culver City needs a snowstorm, by dinnertime tonight, plus a renewed siege of the Asian flu, by bedtime, more than it needs an animal control officer.
What Friends of the Animals and the two-person subcommittee have cooked up is a politically poisoned meal that you would not serve to a dog, much less the City Council.
Who needs research? Who needs fiscal data? Who needs to carefully map out a precise blueprint? Not this subcommittee gang that isn’t shooting straight.
Friends of the Animals and the Council subcommittee have been privately huddling, evidently to the exclusion of City Hall staffers, whom Mr. Silbiger has accused of being bigoted. This is an old wheeze of a charge that Mr. Silbiger trots out whenever people merely oppose him.
Getting a little stuffy in here, isn’t it?
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