Oh, how the stingingly debated subject of the Skateboard Park had seemed to roil the community. Around town, it was said, arguments were so fierce that people’s fiery breaths were turning chilly days into warm ones.
To the unanticipated rescue galloped the newly minted Gallahad, Mr. Rose.
Buttressing his assertion that the whole Skateboard Park argument was overblown, Mr. Rose said there were just as many public speakers on the only other agenda item — regarding view preservation — as for skateboarding.
(The Council unanimously approved the first reading of an admittedly disputed ordinance calling for neighbors to settle with each other disagreements over whether trees obscure scenic views.)
Returning to skateboarding, why the now-so-obviously-appealing interim skateboard park area was not examined in January, before the City Council’s vote, is not yet clear.
Why there has been minimal movement for five years on finalizing a skateboard solution, until very recently, is the second tall conundrum.
Mr. Rose, the peacemaker, wanted and won a logical, sensible middle way that — he hopes — denies either side the ability to claim flat-out victory.
A Peacemaker’s Path to Conquest
Unbeknownst to most of his Council colleagues and to everyone in the public sector, Mr. Rose has been stealthily working, offstage, on a compromise for a month and a half.
Since shortly after the City Council’s controversial vote on Jan. 9 to position the long lingering Skateboard Park in the street-level grassy area of the park, driven apparently by security concerns, Mr. Rose himself has been troubled.
He was determined to win a more satisfactory outcome.
Immediately after the vote, environmentally attuned voices, led by Mr. Rose’s Council teammate Alan Corlin and by Jeff Cooper, a member of the Parks and Recreation Commission, complained that the choice of replacing precious grass with cement for skateboarding was intolerably destructive.
Even though the City Council seemingly had foreclosed further debate by voting three to two to assign skateboarding to the grassy area, Mr. Corlin and Mr. Cooper ignited community arguments.
Mr. Cooper organized a well publicized Save the Grass picnic of protest on the grassy area. The event was richly covered by the city’s newspapers. It was said a goodly number of supporters, estimated at seventy-five, spilled into the park to join Mr. Cooper’s demonstration.
Meanwhile, the City Council, over other protests, “surprisingly” agreed two weeks ago to revisit the subject. Following parliamentary rules, Mr. Rose, as a member of the voting majority on the subject, made the official motion to reconsider the original vote. He made the move, ostensibly, at the behest of Mr. Corlin.
What hardly anyone but a few principal players behind the scenes knew was that Mr. Rose was working assiduously to achieve a muted solution that felt like velvet.
Instead of pursuing an outcome where either the supporters of the grassy area or the advocates for the cement paved area could gloat and claim their side had triumphed, Mr. Rose tread a less partisan path.
When No One Was Looking
Far away from probing, judgmental community eyes, Mr. Rose approached the co-hero of this unusual saga, Bill LaPointe. Since last summer, he has been the resourceful, thoughtful but committedly quiet director of the Parks and Rec Dept.
Quiet people usually don’t find themselves willingly at the nexus of thorny subjects.
If a stage were nearby, Mr. LaPointe probably would have to be dragged out onto the boards. He ain’t the type to find the spotlight, even with a search warrant.
By Mr. Rose’s recollection, it was six weeks ago that he held a memorable thirty-second conversation with Mr. LaPointe.
To coin a debatably cute expression, Mr. LaPointe was about to become the point man in this off-stage project.
According to Mr. Rose, “I said to him, ‘Bill, you need to re-look at this location for the Skateboard Park.’
“That was all that I suggested,” Mr. Rose said. He did not want to load up the argument by urging him to follow one location or another.
“I did what all of us should have done all along — leave it up to the staff,” Mr. Rose said. “It always is better to let staff go to work on finding a solution rather than trying to micromanage, as some people like to do.”
At the end of the evening, Mr. Rose said from the dais that “there were no winners, we all failed.” Mr. Corlin, however, assumed a different view. “I feel pretty good about this,” he said. “This was a good compromise.”
With the crucial cooperation of Mayor Albert Vera, rarely a strategic common ally, Mr. Rose reduced all complaining to wispy clouds of smoke.
Exuding two compatible kinds of fused confidence —the boldness of a cat burglar and the quiet presumptiveness of a world-class surgeon — Mr. Rose presented an eighteen-minute, fifteen hundred and sixty-word speech that instantly pre-empted all disagreements.
The more impressive because he spoke extemporaneously, Mr. Rose, unheralded as a rhetorician, welded together the logic of his argument so forcefully that the smartest diehard foe could not have pried apart his step-by-step concepts.
“I don’t write speeches,” Mr. Rose said. “It is difficult for me to read the words. I would rather speak from my heart.”
The Mayor Takes Charge
Instead of following entrenched City Council policy, inviting the revved-up public to pump out its opinions, the briskly independent Mr. Vera froze the evening.
Asking the assertedly panting public to be patient, Mr. Vera turned over the floor to Mr. Rose.
As Mr. Rose put it later, he “whacked” a few people, including, collectively, the members of the Parks and Recreation Commission, and his own teammates on the City Council.
However, Mr. Rose’s most withering blasts undeniably were directed at the Culver City News, for allegedly overhyping or needlessly fueling the community debate and, more specifically, at the veteran activist Mr. Cooper of the Parks and Rec Commission.
Mr. Rose said that Mr. Cooper’s “main mistake” was “in never talking to the elected body (the City Council) and trusting one person (Mr. Corlin).
“The mistake that all ten of us made (on the Parks and Rec Commission, which only has recommending power, and the City Council) is that we were guilty of ignoring the big picture. None of us thought big enough.”
As one of the least likely speechmakers on the City Council, the seldom-aroused Mr. Rose had the incalculably powerful weapon of surprise on his side.
The unanticipated combination of Mr. Rose’s shrewd backstage politicking and his brilliant declamation from the dais obviated the need for any other comment, although some elected persons and private persons found the chance irresistible. Their observations, at the end, appeared weightless.
For months, the storyline in the newspapers went, a conflicted community suffered from a tortured heart:
The suddenly seething subject of where in sloping Culver City Park to carve the Skateboard Park — in the Jefferson Boulevard-adjacent grassy area or the more tree-shrouded paved portion just up the hill? — surpassed in importance traditional priorities such as good health, safe neighborhoods, happy marriages.
An unquenchable affair of the heart, it supposedly was threatening the fabric of Culver City.
This is how the affair ended:
Mr. Vera: Very few times I have acted so independently, but tonight I am going to reverse the order a little bit. All of you, please be patient. Mr. Rose.
Councilman Steve Rose’s Complete Address
A good friend of mine has always said that when people move into the city, in their minds that is when the history of Culver City starts.
In the case of the Skateboard Park, it seems to me that too many people began the history of the Skateboard Park when they read about it in the paper. The history of the Skateboard Park goes back to the last part of the last century when our City Attorney, who was involved in environmental law in an earlier life, worked real, real hard with the oil companies and the state of California, and got an old oil well site removed and cleaned.
Then a former member of the City Council and a former mayor, David Hauptman, volunteered his own time and money and built the ramps and slides — whatever you call them — that are currently there. It was only supposed to have been a temporary fix. That probably happened about seven years ago or so.
Then back in, I have my notes here, April 3, 2001, the Parks and Rec Commission discussed the priority of funding capital improvements grant. The Skateboard Park was part of that discussion.
So we are talking about a new Skateboard Park for four years and eleven months.
There were any number of meetings that both the Commission and this Council had over these past five years. I believe, if I counted them right, there were thirty-some-odd meetings.
I am reciting this because there has been so much misinformation, or lack of information, passed out the last couple of weeks.
I have received phone calls and emails that said we did this almost in darkness, without public notification. Government, at least this government, has always notified its constituents, when an agenda item was up. There is a certain responsibility that educated citizens, aware citizens, need to have in the process of a democracy that works.
Their responsibility is to check on government. That responsibility also falls to our local press, which, in some cases, may or may not do a great job. In the last couple weeks, two weeks ago, I asked to have this item re-agendized.
There have been two front page articles on it. Not once was I called or asked my opinions or reasons why. In this latest week’s paper, I am going to specifically show it to you and explain to you something.
As past president of the Historical Society, I learned that you can read an old newspaper, and it might give you some facts. But those facts may not always be right. You need to do a little bit more research and digging into what a newspaper has written or a photograph that it has shown. It may be correct and it may mislead the public and be a historical nightmare because it causes issues that you cannot figure out.
With that, I will show you, and I don’t know if you can see it, last week’s edition of the Culver City News (holding up the newspaper).
I just question, if the green (grass) is so valuable to save, why was the picture taken on cement? If there were sixty-five or seventy-five people, how come this picture did not show it?
I am not saying that people are lying. I wasn’t there because I had another commitment that day. I just question why. As an amateur historian, I guess that is something I have learned over the last four years as president of the Historical Society.
Then I get emails. Let me quote exactly what it says. “Remember the permanent skateboard facility will be built. For the health of our watershed and the good of the whole park, it just needs to be built in the right place, the location originally recommended by the Commission and the place considered safe by the Interim Police Chief and the Parks Director.”
The original place…this email was written by Jim Lamm of the Ballona Creek Renaissance…is the bottom of the park.
Let me read you another email. “I am trying to get the word out, ASAP, to as many friends as possible about the destruction of the grassy picnic area at Culver City Park to make way for a skateboard park when there is a great space our Parks and Recreation Commission recommended on the upper level, where the basketball court is. I totally support a skateboard park, but want to keep this great grassy area intact.”
Actually a truthful statement, but not the whole truth because Mr. Cooper forgot to say this was a change in the Park and Recreation Commission’s opinion.
Now let me just go on and say that on Nov. 11, the Joint Skateboard Park Committee met — that is, two members of the Parks and Rec Commission and two members of the City Council. This subcommittee was originally supposed to meet earlier. But we received a call from Mayor Vera, who said he was stuck on the highway coming back from up north and had a bad cold, if we could reschedule it. And the Committee did.
It was set for Nov. 11 at 7 o’clock. Three of the four members were there. We waited fifteen minutes. Mr. Cooper was missing in action. He didn’t call. He didn’t let us know. His daughter was sick. But in today’s age of communication, if we would have received a call, we would have held it over.
At that time, the three members voted to put the Skateboard Park on the bottom.
On Nov. 16, the Parks and Rec Commission voted three to two to put the Skateboard Park on the bottom.
On Dec. 6, on a very rare action, that an agendized item was a reconsideration of that decision, and a vote (was taken) on the same night.
This City Council, for as long as I have been on it, and previously to it, has always given the greatest ability for the public input to be involved. I still stand appalled that a Commission would, a, reconsider and vote on it on the same night.
That, during the five years of this Skateboard Park, was the only time that something was really done without being agendized. I think that is something to be concerned with, that after numerous meetings, signatures and workshops, that a Commission changes its opinion without notifying the public in advance.
The problem is, the saddest part, is the issue of where the Skateboard Park should be, or what is the best place for it, is more concerned with personality issues than facts. That the consideration was not done properly. I fault the Parks and Rec Commission. I fault this body for not always challenging staff to come up with the best possible plan.
Sometime prior to the announcement of the protest, the so-called protest, up at the park, I did challenge staff. I did talk to Mr. LaPointe (the Parks and Rec Director), and I just said… I didn’t tell him what to do. I raised my expectations, and asked him, “Think about it. There has to be a way of solving this issue.”
The Point of Failure
Two weeks ago, for the second time in my Council career, I knew something that I didn’t do right, or that I knew something was going to happen when a fellow member of this Council asked me to re-agendize this event. I really had no problem doing it. I knew somewhere that our Parks and Rec Commiss— our Parks and Rec Director, Bill LaPointe, would come up with an answer.
And he did.
Those of you who called me, I said I would always vote to have the Skateboard Park on the bottom. And I still am.
But I think where the Commission failed and where the Council failed, is why we never considered putting it just where it is now.
I think that is the simplest answer and the appropriate answer. And I sure hope the Commission and this body have learned to take personalities out of this. It isn’t a matter of, if you’re right or I’m right or he’s right or she’s right.
It’s a matter of what is right for the citizens of Culver City, and our kids.
I believe keeping it down on Jefferson Boulevard, where it is currently now safely placed, doesn’t remove grass. It gives a front view to our kids. And skateboarders are showoffs.
The reason I always wanted it on the bottom is because you have to market something. If you hide skateboarders, they are not going to show up. If you give them a showoff place, they are going to show up.
So keeping it currently where it is, I believe, is the best alternate.
I want to thank Bill LaPointe, Charles Herbertson (the Public Works Director) and Carol Schwab (the City Attorney) for working on it. And I mention Interim (Police) Chief Bill Burck also.
Before we go any further, and I think it might eliminate a lot of discussion, I just would like to move that we, a, have, that we put the permanent Skateboard Park where the Interim Skateboard Park is.
And I want to thank the mayor for working with me on this. If it wouldn’t have been the two of us, I don’t think it would have gotten done from a political standpoint.
Once again, thank you to staff.
