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I repeat, if, as a certain Vice Mayor maintains, it is the obligation of the City Council to say “yowzir, yowzir, yowzir” when an unhappy mob storms Council Chambers, who needs a City Council as a pesky go-between?
Just implement mob rule straightaway. Then all of us can drive directly home on Monday nights and spend an extra evening with our families.
Mob rule likely will undergo another dress rehearsal this evening.
It will be fascinating to watch the by-play between the avowed populists on the City Council and the large, angry, one-track crowd that is expected at 7 o’clock tonight in Council Chambers for one more showdown over the proposed mixed-use project at 4043 Irving Pl.
An unfortunate cement-strength mentality has been gripping Culver City the last several years, a refrain that sounds like “Not one more building while I live here.”
Poor Sal Gonzales, the developer.
From this distance, it seems that he has attempted to appease the extremely cranky neighbors by shrinking his original scheme — how many times has that line been written in this town about an assortment of frustrated, mistreated builders?
Are Their Complaints Worthy?
I may be wrong.
But the Irving Place neighbors seem to be entirely unreasonable with their incivil threatening gestures and their demands that Mr. Gonzales build a postage stamp-sized building so that one more new car won’t clutter their already clogged streets.
Both parties have met with city staffers the last week and a half without any progress being reported.
I understand the activist Cary Anderson’s complaint about non-neighborhood residents parking on “their” streets in “their” neighborhood.
But isn’t this our city?
What if I said, “You do not live on my street. You may not use it at any hour of the day. And, heaven forfend, you may not park there or I will have your car permanently impounded?”
Who made you king of the fiefdom?
Ladies and gentlemen, when you choose to reside within a baseball throw of Downtown, the busiest thoroughfares in Culver City, and then expect to dictate terms about who will and won’t be allowed to drive along or park on your streets, I believe you have struck an unreasonable note.
Not Everyone May Complain
If you lived in Studio Estates, out on the West Side or on Culver Crest, you might have a beef.
But not if you live on the perimeter of Downtown. Then you have ceded a portion of your glassed-in privacy.
Although the number of condos proposed for Mr. Gonazles’ project has seemed liquid, the last time I looked there was a heated argument over whether there should be 28 or 24. The bad guys offered 28. The good guys, 24.
When Mayor Scott Malsin sensibly observed two weeks ago tonight, What difference would four more cars a day make on Irving Place? the crudest members of the mob, which behaved rudely all evening, hooted at him.
This Is a Difference?
Isn’t this a specious argument? Twenty-eight or twenty-four?
Shall we duel at 100 paces?
I presume those doing the loudest hooting are employed. Wouldn’t they be at work when those four cars are buzzing down Irving Place?
Do they want Lin Howe School moved from their neighborhood, too?
There may be good reasons for strongly reducing the size of Mr. Gonzales’ building.
But if a fair-minded jury were hearing this case, its members would say, “We have not heard any so far.”
