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A pity that the programmer for the every-Monday City Council agenda lacks imagination.

Habitually, the programmer buries the juiciest items at the end of the long evening agenda when the Council is reduced to talking to itself because the sensible public long since has fled home.

Often this is when the routinely isolated arch-liberal Gary Silbiger and his numerous Council adversaries are at their most entertaining.

At Least It Was Under 60 Minutes

For the final 55 unbelievable minutes of last Monday’s meeting, in a paean to Mr. Silbiger, the Council —Mr. Silbiger, more accurately — debated the non-issue of notifying residents when issues of interest to them bob up on the Council’s agenda.

This probably is the deadest of the dead horses that Mr. Silbiger regularly beats.

That the rest of the Council — which appears to have scant interest in the subject — agrees to discuss notification shows that the four of them possess either compassion or a sense of humor.

Notification of targeted members of the community is one of those typical so-vague liberal lollipops that sounds almost legitimate. Upon closer inspection, it falls apart, and serious people have trouble maintaining a straight face.

Potential Eyewitnesses Scattered

The Council was fortunate virtually everyone had gone home Monday night. The crazy, mind-numbing drama would have sent even serene people scrambling up the aisles, arms flailing.

My favorite show biz moment came when the conservative Steve Rose and the slightly more liberal Mr. Silbiger exchanged barbs about Mr. Silbiger’s allegedly Kremlin-like approach to notification.

For 20 staggeringly boring minutes, Mr. Silbiger closely questioned the impressively patient Asst. City Manager Martin Cole about arcane, esoteric details regarding City Hall’s notification list.

They should have talked over these flyspeck matters in the hallway before the meeting or earlier at lunch. This was housekeeping stuff. I was reminded of two fellows reviewing details of their colorless shoestrings.

Mailroom Chatter

They bantered back and forth over the distinctions between emails and post cards, who should be on the lists, how many lists there should be, how people could sign up for one list but not another, how to sign up — and, finally, what Mr. Cole’s ailing aunt in Nebraska ate for breakfast on Christmas morning of 1943.

With serious city business awaiting their attention, it is difficult to imagine why the four City Council members not named Silbiger would invest their precious time on this non-starter of a subject.

The interminable, bone-dry, miniscule exchanges between Mr. Silbiger and Mr. Cole resembled two bored, perspiring, straw-hatted, white-suited chaps stuck on a summertime Greyhound bus ride from Barstow to Twentynine Palms. The mundanity of it all.

Control Is the Goal

In the mold of a tightly controlling liberal, I believe Mr. Silbiger’s objective is to have City Hall knock on the doors of all the 24,000 or so voters in the 17,000 housing units in this town every Friday afternoon and announce, in detail, the following Monday’s City Council agenda.

Notification is a decent seedling of an idea that has been blown up into a monster. Councilmen say that state law requires City Hall to mail out notifications to residents within 300 feet of a development-type project, and 500 feet in certain cases.

Otherwise, City Hall’s obligation, we are told is limited to posting its agenda in a forum accessible to the public. Period. The Long Beach City Council just adopted a new policy to post its agendas 12 days in advance. Culver City’s is available four or five days ahead of the Monday meetings.

Mr. Silbiger doggedly and unrealistically is pursuing notification of all individuals on all subjects. With, I presume, free meals and universal healthcare.

This Is Not About Choice

Mr. Silbiger believes the public’s hand needs to be held. He believes the public should be coaxed into attending all meetings, whether people want to attend or not. You will report.

At one surreal juncture on Monday night when you presumed everything specious and uninteresting had been thoroughly explored in painful detail, Mr. Silbiger demanded to inspect all of the community names on the city’s various notification lists.

“I don’t need their email addresses,” Mr. Silbiger conceded. “I just want to see what we have.”

Heaven only knows why.

Mr. Cole stiffened and resisted.

When Mr. Silbiger pushed harder, City Manager Jerry Fulwood, commonly a silent observer, stepped in to deny him more forcefully.

“This is a privacy issue,” Mr. Fulwood, government executive, told Mr. Silbiger, lawyer.

“Privacy?” Mr. Silbiger snapped back. “With who? This is called a Public Records Act, a Verbal Public Records Act.”

Soviets in Culver City?

This was too much for Mr. Rose.

“Sounds like the Kremlin talking,” he said, unsmilingly.

“How do you know what the Kremlin talks like?” asked Mr. Silbiger.

“I hear it every Monday,” was Mr. Rose’s rejoinder.

Only nobody laughed because the house was empty. Deservedly.