The Last Days of Jerry Fulwood are rivaling the Last Days of Pompeii for wackiness.
Only this is bizarre, not funny, wackiness.
It also is an unfortunate commentary on the state of matters inside City Hall.
If you tuned into the passionate, three-cornered debate over “funding” for the May 9 Car Show at last night’s City Council meeting, you may have thought you were watching an old-fashioned television rasslin’ match.
My question: Was it really a faux argument that was largely staged for the nice ladies and gentlemen in the bleacher seats?
Did the Wrestling Help?
For an entertaining, frustrating — and not necessarily authentic — hour last evening, some of Culver City’s best known personalities rumbled in the dirt over whether selfless City Hall or the selfless Exchange Club selflessly endures greater pain each spring in order to stage the Car Show.
Which side sheds more of its blood, selflessly remember, for the benefit of you and me so that we can have a civically terrific time for one Saturday in May every year?
You decide in a few minutes.
I am not saying the debate was rigged. It was not. But, ladies and gentlemen of Newspaperland, you were not let in on the whole truth.
Those boys who expended so much energy flamboyantly disagreeing with each other, were breathing some inauthentic fumes.
As if the players were living in real time, members of the sponsoring Exchange Club — known hereafter as the Good Guys — were pitted against City Manager Jerry Fulwood and Redevelopment Administrator Todd Tipton, known hereafter as the Bad Guys.
The four members of the City Council not named Scott Malsin — he had to recuse himself because he belongs to the Exchange Club — refereed the fight between the Bad Guys and the Good Guys.
The No. 1 Question
Entering the debate over whether City Hall or the Exchange Club makes the greater, darned near war-sized, selfless sacrifice for your benefit and mine, the fate of the 5-year-old Car Show was blowing in the wind:
Will it be held this year in Culver City?
Will it be moved out of town?
Or will it die a heavily mourned death?
Officially, the verdict will not be rendered until next Monday’s City Council meeting.
But I know how I am voting.
I think the call is a cinch. My money is on the Car Show happening in the same place, at the same time it has been produced for the last 5 years, throughout the streets of Downtown.
Didn’t you hear a clear majority on the Council, Chris Armenta, Gary Silbiger and Mehaul O’Leary, speaking in reverential tones about what an institution the Car Show has become?
They would place their bodies between the wall and any attempt to disgorge the event from Culver City.
Did Honesty Just Leave Town?
If honesty is your personal preference, call last night’s debate over which side does, or should, spend more money on the Car Show marked-down window dressing. Probably makes everybody in Council Chambers feel better.
To succinctly recapitulate events, City Hall informed the Exchange Club that the bill for the Car Show was going to run a record $26,000 this year, almost double the cost in previous years. When Jeff Cooper and the Exchange Club protested, Mr. Tipton said expenses skyrocketed because this year for the first time City Hall was making an accurate survey of its costs.
As sure as rain, the Exchange Club stands before the City Council every year and asks, begs, for the Councilmen to grant the club a “$10,000 fee waiver.” Predictably, the Council members grumble, as if that Presidential chimpanzee in last week’s New York Post cartoon had stepped on their toes, and then they always say “yes.”
Good, say members of the Exchange Club, because in an average year we only net $2,500 from the Car Show. The $2,500 will just cover the difference between the $10,000 bill you forgave us and the $12,000 you said that the whole darned thing costs.
Okay, says City Hall every year, and with that, the boys from the Exchange Club and the boys from City Hall clasp each other’s hands and skip, in unison, down a path strewn with beautiful May flowers.
Only here is the punchline:
No money, dear friends, ever changes hands. Never has, sources tell me.
How about that?
This is a dog-and-pony show.
City Hall could say that it costs $787 billion every May to produce the Car Show.
Mr. Cooper says the Exchange Club, for its part, spends $25,000 a year to put the Car Show together. He could say 50 cents or $190,000.
Irrelevant. Each side spends what it spends every year, and these public debates don’t affect what anybody pays anybody because nobody pays anybody anything.
Got that?
What the Good Guys and the Bad Guys argue about in public appears to be irrelevant?
They could just as easily be arguing over climate change.
So what about the argument over how City Hall inhumanely is shedding blood and sweat, Albert Schweitzer-style, just to reward us little people for being such darned good citizens the rest of the year?
Or how about the Exchange Club’s feisty rebuttal that here is how much it can afford, and not one penny more?
While we await answers to those inquiries, Mr. Cooper is scheduled to meet Mr. Tipton at 5 this afternoon to determine if the Exchange Club can come close to paying some of the $19,000 bill that City Hall says the Car Show will cost after massaging the books.
Mr. Cooper said this afternoon that the Exchange Club has no money left to make any concessions to City Hall.
“Bottom line is,” he said, “whatever money we move around won’t make any difference.”
To say it differently, they are not playing with real money. This tug-of-war is neither physical nor fiscal. It is psychological.
Anyone for a snappy round of Monopoly?
