· For the first time within memory, the audience selectively was allowed to talk back to the City Council, and Vice Mayor Gary Silbiger won the evening’s rhetorical prize for advancing the oddest idea, a substantial achievement for a meeting that may not be favorably remembered by many people. He said he hoped the strapped city could find funding that would allow residents of the two mobile home parks on Grandview Boulevard to remain in their present locations until they die.
Monday Night at the Fights
The City Council goes on the road several times a year, in months with five Mondays. Occasionally, the neighborhood watch-style meetings are spirited. Usually, though, the tone and tenor would not disturb a light-sleeping infant.
After an innocent start, this visit to a very involved West Culver City neighborhood that is sensitive and feels underserved broke into a hefty, four-sided verbal brawl.
Scarlet veins emerged on Mr. Vera’s head. He strained to maintain order. He barely succeeded. Decorum deteriorated faster than snow on a sudden eighty-degree morning. Restraint was not far behind. Voices, tempers and temperatures were raised, tripling the fifty-degree mercury reading outside on the playground.
As non-discriminating quarrelists, City Council members managed, again, to fight with each other almost as often and virulently as they tangled with several members of the crowd.
The least mellow, most dramatic scene came without warning in the closing minutes. Property owner Tony Pappas, a veteran at dueling with City Hall, is known for a soft voice that belies strong language, which sometimes veers toward acerbity. Several in the audience already had filed outside by the time Mr. Pappas strode to the speaker table. He was warmly greeted, on a first-name basis, by Mr. Vera who said he had not seen him in a long time.
Without ado, Mr. Pappas broke into condemnatory language, flatly, unambiguously accusing at least one city official, by name, of “corruption.” He also managed to comment acidly on the state of graffiti, stray shopping carts, the assertedly overvalued importance of parking enforcement, allegedly inattentive City Hall officials, a Police Dept. employee who reportedly told him to take his complaints about graffiti elsewhere, anywhere else, and tools of blight that supposedly had escaped the attention of at least two Council members.
At length, Mr. Pappas became the only speaker to be told that he had exceeded his time. As he returned to his front-row seat, the mayor, Mr. Rose and Ms. Gross took turns stoutly defending the honor of the city. Mr. Pappas, apparently boiling, tried to respond, as audience members had been permitted to do throughout the meeting. He was interrupted and scolded each time he spoke up before drawing the ultimate threat.
At a point, Mr. Pappas’s very appearance enraged the mayor. “Don’t give me a smirk,” Mr. Vera snapped, the harshest rebuke delivered to a singled-out audience member in years. “One word,” vowed Mr. Vera, who is older and smaller, “and I will personally get up and throw you out.”
Perhaps the most attentive listener, several seats along the first row, was the activist Egon Monostory who, himself, has gone to war a few times with the City Council.
Effectively, he leaped to Mr. Pappas’s defense. Addressing Mr. Rose, Mr. Monostory said: “If you want examples of corruption, fraud and conspiracy (by city officials), I will give them to you.” He volunteered to name names. For a flash, the debate between the two adversaries escalated. Mr. Rose responded briefly but pointedly.
Only after that furious flurry did the tenseness in the room abate, slightly. With a heave a moment later, Mr. Vera adjourned the meeting as if he had just concluded an uphill race.
A Different Direction
The Town Hall meeting was intended to be a showcase event for frustrated West Culver residents, especially those who feel City Hall devotes more energy elsewhere in the community. A smallish, reticent crowd that steadily grew sparred politely with the City Council during the first hour. Once the edges of civility frayed, though, they ripped before calm was restored.
City Council candidates Mehaul O’Leary and Scott Malsin have become staples at Council meetings this winter. This figured to be a home game for Mr. Malsin, the West Side’s leading voice. In another departure from tradition, audience members were allowed to visit the speaker table an unlimited number of times, and Mr. Malsin spoke on four occasions, always succinctly.
Invariably respectful, residents nevertheless had the Council members on their heels, challenging them to defend the supposedly uneven pace and unpopular quality of redevelopment throughout their neighborhood. They wanted to know why the City Council determined that their park, Culver West, would have its name altered to include the late mayor, Richard Alexander, before neighbors had a chance to voice their objections.
The mayor and Mr. Rose attempted to explain a perennial, thorny question about the historic existence of a non-Culver City zip code. They offered no hope for relief.
Amidst the disagreements came Ms. Gross, possibly the most insistent defender of the city’s commitment to inerrancy and what she said was the City Council’s commendable productivity. When she was not on defense, she sailed critical words toward audience members who thought responses from the dais were too generic, and she scolded Mr. Malsin for answering her from his chair in the crowd. Councilman Alan Corlin stepped in to clarify. He said direct exchanges were the main reason the Council went on the road, which ended the dispute over audience responses. Ms. Gross also spanked an unidentified journalist for what she said was erroneous reporting.
For sheer villainy vs. good guy intrigue, an exchange between Joseph Rosendo, longtime Herbert Street activist, and Mr. Vera was unsurpassed. At the end of his monologue, noteworthy because it was delivered with refinement and restraint, Mr. Rosendo posed a tame-sounding question that sparked yet another fire. He asked why the City Council voted to eliminate residents of the two Grandview Boulevard mobile home parks from a city redevelopment plan when sentiment so obviously was in the opposite direction. Not only was it regrettable, Mr. Rosendo said, that the vulnerable mobile home residents had been thrown to the wolves of the marketplace, he was “flabbergasted” by the Council’s rejection of the people’s obvious will.
In his reaction, Mr. Vera threw a mysterious veil over last October’s vote. “Blackmail” was involved, he said emphatically, as incendiary of a term and charge as has been heard on the dais in years. Heightening the imagery of hush-hush manipulation, Mr. Vera invited Mr. Rosendo to visit him at his store, the Sorrento Italian Market, where, he indicated, he would disclose what he chose not to say in public.
At the dark suggestion of skullduggery, Mr. Rose took immediate umbrage. Applying the term blackmail to the Council vote, he said, “was inappropriate.” Mr. Vera did not let the rejoinder even simmer. “I will not apologize,” he said sharply, his volume rising. “From where I sit, it was blackmail, pure blackmail.”
Live and Let Spend
One week after the ailing Chief Administrative Officer Jerry Fulwood said City Hall was suffering a case of severe financial shorts, Mr. Silbiger, a candidate for re-election on April 11, declared his wish that City Hall could find the funding that would allow residents of the two doomed mobile home parks on Grandview Boulevard to remain on the grounds the rest of their lives.
Before Mr. Corlin starchly explained why the notion was infeasible, Mr. Silbiger etched a heroic defense of the elderly and low-income mobile home residents that echoed a similar but isolated stand he had assumed in the months prior to the vote.
Mr. Silbiger said City Hall had clearly erred a couple of years ago by including the two parks in a massive neighborhood redevelopment project. Conversely, many park residents believe that the Councilman failed them last autumn when he stepped away from his near-solo role as their champion defender to create the three-to-two Council majority to exclude residents from city-sponsored redevelopment.
After vacillating for a year and a half over whether they wanted to be included, a majority of the forty-three homeowners in the two parks voted for inclusion. Long uncertain whether it would be more advantageous to accept the city’s terms for relocation or risk becoming free agents, park residents opted for the city alternative because the financial conditions were known and appeared increasingly appealing.
The polling was conducted at the behest of City Hall to gauge the residents’ feelings. However, moments after the polling was announced, the City Council, which also had been ambiguous, voted by a slim majority to drop the parks from the redevelopment project.
After a noisy sixteen-month runup to the final vote, park residents have lived in an indeterminate kind of limbo existence in the one hundred days since their fate was evidently decided. They don’t know whether, or how soon, the ownership of each park is going to sell the property to developers, leaving every homeowner to negotiate a settlement for himself. This is a far different outcome from the one they had envisioned. Under the City Hall proposal, the city would have reimbursed each homeowner more generously, say experts, than any deal residents are likely to obtain when they barter separately.
It was left for Mr. Silbiger’s teammate, Mr. Corlin, to quell the discussion by throwing a spade of dirt on the Vice Mayor’s suggestion. “The amount of money it would take to implement some of the ideas we have heard,” Mr. Corlin said, “far outstrips the money we have.”
