Cue the orchestra, maestro.
The Oscar for Ambiguity is awarded to the City Council for coolly sidestepping a commitment to its stated – not acted upon – objective of developing a controlling device against fracking.
Oh, how the five Council members joyfully sang out the Hallelujah chorus of the We Fear and Loathe Fracking anthem over and over, as if this were a sunrise service on Easter Sunday.
However, sources told the newspaper after last night’s meeting that glowing appearances notwithstanding, Culver City is no closer to a fracking ban or moratorium this morning than it was last week or last year.
“There clearly were not three votes to move forward with a moratorium or a ban,” saidthe city’s most reliable Council-watcher.”
The longest, driest dialogue of a very tall evening pitted Mayor Jeff Cooper and Vice Mayor Meghan Sahli-Wells over a procedural matter of extremely narrow importance and even less interest, neither of which was an impediment.
The Summation Is Not Pretty
Here is how one person summarized their parrying and thrusting:
“They ultimately agreed to a decision to begin drafting moratorium language. But they want to wait and see what happens with the Los Angeles City Council, wait and see what happens with the progress in Los Angeles. Our Council might beat L.A. to the punch by adopting a drilling ordinance with whatever fracking prohibitions or provisions there are.”
Got that?
“The City Council is a long way from a headline that says ‘Moratorium on Fracking on Its Way.’”
The interminable and arcane dialogue among the Council members was so heavily clotted with mud that Andy Weissman, arguably the clearest, most transparent mind on the Council, had to intervene and seek claraification.
For more than two hours, the Council roared through an impressive anti-fracking-sounding script. From the audience’s perspective, appeared to be a heroic stand against the widely feared longtime oil drilling method called fracking. But when the five of them unfolded their hands, their palms were naked.
Was it a show? They made no progress toward a fracking moratorium.
Did the boisterous thunder, lightning and patriotic proclamations up and down the dais seeming to condemn fracking advance the anti-fracking cause?
Not by a single farthing, was the unambiguous word emanating from inside City Hall.
“I don’t believe there are three votes for a moratorium,” said one man who has been studying the City Council since 1993.
Set up for a Vague Outcome?
The agenda item that excited the familiar faces of the Culver City clutch of anti-fracking activists was purposely framed vaguely:
This was the Council’s charge: “Update on Recent Developments and Discussion of Options Regarding Hydraulic Fracturing and Other Well Stimulation Operations in the Culver City Portion of the Inglewood Oil Field.”
The final body count was as convoluted as the charge. If all five had stayed home, the resukt would not have been different.
Eighteen stimulated, utterly sincere anti-fracking community members, some so steeped in knowledge they don’t need a cheat sheet for relatively obscure, complex data, trooped to the microphone.
For the first time in three years in Council Chambers, they felt their moment to strike hardest against fracking had arrived.
It was not to be.
“The Council was so ambiguous,” said a source, “that I don’t think anyone is going to be dissatisfied with what they did. They kicked the can down the road.
“There clearly were not three votes to move forward with a moratorium or a ban.”
