The Council will meet four evenings next week, mainly to wade through the budget hearings but also to consider several agenda items. On the second of these four nights, there is going to be a breathlessly awaited showdown.
By the reckoning of City Manager Jerry Fulwood, this is the night the City Council will be airing its views on the future of its relationships with the Dr. King Day Committee, the Sister Cities Committee and the Fiesta La Ballona Committee.
Tension Has Been Building
Sister Cities and the King Day people have been in protest mode since April when the City Council first announced it would reassess its creaking partnership with these non-governmental organizations.
This will be the only night during the budget hearings that Mr. Silbiger who tirelessly pleads for stronger communal participation wont have to wonder where the people are
Lets change the cadence.
This thoughtful note from Tom Supple makes me glad my parents did not change my name to Bob Champion, a move they once considered.
In your articles on the South Sepulveda redevelopment project, you have referred to the audiences at the Citizens Advisory Committee meetings as a rowdy crowd, as cranky senior citizens, and as flaunting the rules of civility.
I dont think you will find them any less so after the cancellation of the June 6 meeting.
I went to the Vets Auditorium on Wednesday night to see if anyone showed up.
No one from the city was there. There was no sign to indicate that the meeting had been cancelled.
The sign on the door was obviously put there by the staff of Vets Auditorium because it listed all the activities scheduled for the Rotunda Room that day, including the CAC meeting.
About 20 people showed up for the meeting. They included a woman who had driven up from Orange County to bring her mother to the meeting. If the anger they expressed last night is any indication of the mood they will be in for the meeting on Wednesday, June 27, the prior meetings will seem calm by comparison.
The lack of any attempt to notify people, and the fact that they didnt even post a notice at the Rotunda Room about the cancellation, shows what the city feels about citizen input.
Taking People Seriously
Stumbles by the developer Mr. Champion and by City Hall keep stacking up, and the anger of residents and business owners in the South End keeps building.
Their collective fury should be taken seriously, and I am not sure that it is.
It would be a mistake to overestimate the ability of Mr. Champions silky salesmanship charisma while under-estimating the popular anger.
The most fascinating political threesome spotted anywhere in Culver City in recent times:
Mr. Champion somewhat incongruously dining at George Petrellis with the the best known personality along Sepulveda Boulevard and his Constant Companion
Handal Out, Serenity in
Dont you think it has been distractingly serene Downtown since the entrepreneur Jay Handal moved out of San Gennaro 13 months ago?
His latest cause, marshaling support for the under-siege military veterans of West L.A. which will be chronicled here next week so far looks like his loneliest fight.
The only veterans who appeal to the popular press are those believed to have committed crimes in Haditha. The several hundred terrorists at Gitmo have far more support in the American media than veterans without property or benefits
She Rates No. 1
When Vice Mayor Carol Gross is termed out of office in April, she could earn a handsome living traveling the country, giving seminars on how to be a maximally effective small town politician.
They should put a crater where her chair was. She will be much more difficult to replace than her more ballyhooed friend Albert Vera.
An intrepid meetings maven, Ms. Gross has stored up so much pragmatic information in the last seven years, she could give her colleagues a month off here and there, and run the Council meetings by herself.
However
The portrait of political pulchritude has a giant scratch across the middle. Ms. Gross just cant resist getting into dustups periodically with Mr. Fulwood.
Time to Cool Off
This weeks drummed up dispute, over the legitimacy of presenting a two-year budget, was beneath her.
She is too smart, too valuable to pick a fight on a subject that was settled last year, assuming a shaky stance that was without merit last year, this year and next year
