Roaring back with hurricane force from recent biting criticism of his career-long acerbic style, Steve Gourley showed the community again last night why his retirement next November will create a canyon-like gap on the School Board.
Nobody does Gourley like Gourley.
He can be like a heaping chocolate cake or a drooling hot fudge sundae placed before a fat girl on a diet. The feast isn’t good for her, but it is so darned tempting.
Mr. Gourley, who recently turned 62 years old, was at his relentless, grilling, lawyerly best in Council Chambers when he jousted for about 10 minutes with calm, disciplined, crisp-speaking, dapper Gabe Garcia, the city’s Traffic Engineer.
Shall We Dance Again?
They go back to the early 1990s when Mr. Gourley was a City Councilman. “I remember when I had hair and yours was black,” cracked Mr. Gourley.
At issue was the “Safe Routes to School” program, which once seemed harmless and straightforward. Supposedly without controversy, Safe Routes is promoting the apple-pie virtues of children walking, skateboarding or bicycling to school as the desirable alternative to parental carpooling every day into vehicular mayhem that makes dropoffs and pickups at all campuses resemble the Last Day of the World.
The salty Mr. Gourley generously peppered his drilling questions with traces of sarcasm. Mr. Garcia responded like a piece of golden toast, not too dark, not too light, heated to exactly the right degree. Without a trace of rancor and never elevating his tone above conversational level, Mr. Garcia dueled Mr. Gourley to a rare standoff.
Neither gentleman veered off course.
Mr. Gourley would unspool an elaborate question that went around the block twice, almost trying to goad Mr. Garcia into making sparks. However, the engineer declined each time. He merely, and softly, responded “Affirmative” on numerous occasions.
But Mr. Gourley did uncork several memorable lines.
Well, Do I?
In researching the Safe Routes plan, he said a 15-year-old had asked him whether he needed to come to a full stop at a Stop sign.
In arguing against installing a traffic signal as a more dangerous alternative on Elenda Street, which leads to three adjacent schools, Mr. Gourley said:
“Nobody rushes to beat a Stop sign. Everybody rushes to beat a red light.”
While Mr. Garcia was emphasizing educational aspects of the Safe Routes program, Mr. Gourley said students need to be taught “when to walk, when to skateboard, when to bicycle — and when to get off their damned cell phones.”
When Mr. Gourley, former state Director of the Dept. of Motor Vehicles, quizzed Mr. Garcia on the degree of enforcement of street signs that can be expected, the engineer seemed to link the amount to funding.
Oh, no, said Mr. Gourley, jumping onto the loudly proclaimed current charge that there is a lack of enforcement. “Enforcement can work through fines,” he snorted.
Meanwhile, the commendable Safe Routes to School plan suddenly has become more complex than the Sacramento budget or whatever is going on in Greece this morning.
Why is a mystery that will be left untended until a later date.
A rudimentary promotion to get young and middle-aged children out of their family cars and onto their sneakers, with backpacks duly attached, traveling through a patchwork of sidewalks, older and new is caught up in a bramble bush of bureaucracy and communal conflicts.
When Mr. Garcia’s department solicited community input, the request was met with a wall of apathy. The handful who answered brought numerous suggestions/objections, and this once simple-step plan has morphed into a nightmare more ghoulish than the Monster Who Ate the Planet.
As a result, the original intention to apply for $1.5 million in grants to implement the apparatus has been delayed, Mr. Garcia said last night, from July 15 to September.
Examining the mess that the Safe Routes plan seems to have become, Mr. Gourley truncated into a sentence what many in Chambers were thinking:
“Implementing this will be incredibly complicated if not sordid.”
School Board Notes: A reminder that the next community meetings on the Safe Routes to School program will be on Saturday, Aug. 20, a week before Fiesta La Ballona…School neighbor Paulette Greenberg urged that children be brought into the Safe Routes discussions. She also offered a slogan: “It’s Cool to Walk to School”…Reginald Brunson, late of the Watts Learning Center, was introduced as the new principal of El Rincon School
