It’s not often we have a new president and presidential party coming into office at the same time as we have a new city council starting up. Since everything is so unknown and, as yet, unwritten, we start looking for small road signs about what’s in store for us on both fronts.
This time I’ll begin locally, where we just held the first city council meeting since a new council majority was sworn in. The questions were sort of hanging in the air. Is the new city council slate or coalition just an election marriage of convenience or are they really a coalition with some shared values and objectives? Will they stick together and vote together? Are they going to change things slowly — sort of evolve — or just jump right in and make changes, since if they vote together they have the three votes to do whatever they like?
We got our first inkling at last Wednesday’s council meeting. The meeting was to assign the council subcommittees, which is normally a very staid affair, but this time there was tension in the room over the assignment of two council members to the critical Administration & Finance Subcommittee, which sets many of the priorities for the city and the way it spends its budget. For several years, Lou La Monte had been a committee member, but there was a motion by Skylar Peak to boot him off and put himself and Rick Mullen onto the committee instead. When Rosenthal and La Monte balked, Peak agreed to make made it a four-month appointment so they will revisit it again, meaning they’d wait four months to make the complete change. Jefferson Wagner seconded it, which meant he was on board, and so far the slate was sticking together. The only reason they agreed to wait a bit was that the situation at the council table was tense and very awkward and, I suspect, the majority wasn’t prepared to begin the new term with a complete rupture in their relationship with La Monte and Rosenthal — but the impression was they didn’t intend to wait long.
The assignments to this subcommittee now and in the near future are important because the issue of what to do with Bluffs Park is coming up soon, and also whether to undo the swap of the city’s Charmlee Park for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy’s Bluffs Park. If so, it will certainly end up as open warfare between factions.
The same night, a group of CERT volunteers came to tell the council that since the former emergency coordinator, Brad Davis, left the city, they basically felt they were being kind of pushed aside and no longer made a city priority. The city manager said they were working on it but, in the priority of things, the city was focusing initially on the professional first responders like firemen and sheriff’s officials, and then afterwards the CERT people, who are all volunteer citizens. That apparently didn’t sit well with some of the CERT group and Rick Mullen jumped in to support them, saying what a wonderful job they were doing — but in the process, it sounded like he was upbraiding City Manager Reva Feldman.
Unless I’ve misread the situation, it appears that some of the city staffers are a bit unsure of the future, and I suspect some new listings are going out on certain government job websites. City government is not the military, and if they want to retain their staff they’re going to have to approach it with a much softer touch.
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Friday we will have a new president and no one can quite believe that in the past week the President-elect Donald Trump has been unable to let go of a battle with Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights icon; once again hit NATO, calling it “obsolete,” sending shock waves through the alliance; dismissed the EU offhandedly; and insulted German Prime Minister Angela Merkel with his comment that her immigration policy was a “catastrophic mistake” — and, to make sure that the Middle East didn’t feel left out, he said he’s going to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, one of those incredibly sensitive issues that could reignite the war in the Middle East. All and all, he had a hell of a week and he hasn’t even been sworn in yet.