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What Vice Mayor Gary Silbiger needs most, two weeks into his seventh year on the City Council, is a gift membership for the Toastmaster’s Club. This may solve the articulation problem, leaving us with one down and a few to go.
I am not sure. But I suspect Mr. Silbiger lays out his private speaking menu before each City Council meeting. Then, like a farmer riding a tractor into the eye of a storm, he ploughs through the soil regardless of the weather, regardless of the answers he receives, regardless of what his colleagues say to him, regardless of how circumstances change as an evening unfurls.
“This is where I am going, and nobody is going to stop me.”
If he is off-key, too bad.
Now About That Little Enthusiasm
Except for my second wife immediately after the rabbi pronounced us inexorably bound, I never have seen less enthusiasm in a public setting than Mr. Silbiger and Councilman Chris Armenta showed last night. When they curved their shovels into the ground to dig up the late Entrada Office Tower project, several persons said that both appeared to be carrying out commitments they had previously made to persons. No energy accompanied their pleas to bring Entrada back. It was a concert starring the Monotones. If they were speaking from their hearts, they were at the wrong address. Their hearts were down around the Culver Hotel, not within hailing distance of City Hall.
Mr. Armenta is a good speaker, and t\his was just an off-night for him.
When the old Council majority left the room two weeks ago, Mr. Silbiger darted into the opening like a starving politician, running like the wind to reach daylight.
Trouble is, either there aren’t any signposts along the highway to guide him, or else he is ignoring them.
Do Not Alter the Script
From Monday to Monday, there is a sameness, a 100 percent regularity, about Mr. Silbiger that my father, two weeks away from 93, envies.
The script hardly varies. Lacking in vision, strategy and flexibility, his agenda path each week is stubbily short and narrow.
Sol Blumenfeld, the Community Development Director, and Murray Kane, a lawyer for the city, speak with such utter clarity that even my first wife would not have found a second question necessary.
Mr. Silbiger engaged both in sleep-inducing dialogues last night. In both cases, Mr. Silbiger asked good opening questions, but then chased both gentlemen around in a circle — forever.
In addition to his extreme notions, Mr. Silbiger entertains worthy ideas. But I was almost dizzy when he and Mr. Blumenfeld reached Round 45 of the Vice Mayor’s inquiry regarding the apportionment of the community benefits option for developers.
The Core Problem
At bottom, I believe the risk-averse, unimaginative Mr. Silbiger suffers from a case of laziness that he mistakes for brilliant insight.
I have watched him most Mondays for 6 years. Making a call on how to vote is not a Silbiger strength.
His laziness stems from his conviction that The People should decide every issue. He has said many times that the people should tell us what to do.
Not even his friend Mr. Armenta buys that rad line.
The Vice Mayor drones along most Mondays about how “the people” are demanding something, anything, that most sensible people would reject. He spoke numerous times last night about a popular outpouring over Entrada.
A Dilemma
Yes, in his mind, there is an outpouring. But the outpourers were invisible last night, the week before and the week before. A hundred of them had their say the nights of April 14-15, before the City Council approved of Entrada. Then, the game ended.
What if 15,000 Culver City residents want to retain the 4th of July fireworks and 16,000 want to kill it off? Mr. Vice Mayor, what do you do?
I can build a machine that will record a vote. It doesn’t eat or burp, and the machine never will embarrass me. I don’t need to elect a human being to cast a vote that he has been told to make.
Mr. Silbiger thinks this is American democracy.
