As the long-awaited architectural crown jewel of Downtown — to be built by The Culver Studios — edged closer to physical reality at Monday night’s City Council meeting, residents were served up numerous reminders of the centrality of the entertainment industry to Culver City. One century after motion picture pioneers established this community as their beachhead, the industry is breathing lustily, like a thriving, multi-pronged enterprise luxuriating in its prime. Just before The Culver Studios won virtually automatic Council approval for its showcase office/commercial building-plaza-street realignment plan, both the Sony Studios and the Actors’ Gang essayed passionate presentations of their own about how deeply each has sunk roots into Culver City. Their video-supported displays of affection for the community were intended to provide graphic evidence of how ubiquitously the industry influences daily life in Culver City. But Monday night, it was the turn of The Culver Studios to pose, alone, in the display window.

At Monday night’s six-hour City Council meeting, which tied a record, the boys stretched out their roles as if they were struggling artists being paid for every breath they drew. They milked a straight-forward discussion of renewing a homeless committee for nearly an hour by wearing out a wheezing, arcane detail that didn’t interest anyone else in Council Chambers. By the standards of surrounding communities, Culver City has no more than a trace of a homeless problem, as you shall shortly see. More or less by acclaim, it was decided that the worst portion of the community’s problem reposes around Vets Park. By actual count, according to Councilwoman Carol Gross, the homeless population lately has been reduced to four persons. “Two live in a car and two don’t,” Ms. Gross said. The five members of the City Council argued relentlessly about how to address the crisis that neighbors say genuinely exists. Some neighbors say the predicament is frightening. Meanwhile, Council members could not agree on three points — whether Ad Hoc Homeless Committee was sufficient to oversee the total homeless population of Culver City, whether a special, separate committee should be assigned to oversee Vets Park, and the size and precise makeup of the homeless committee.

Fairly leaping toward his landmark 60th birthday next month, City Councilman Steve Rose said life will be dramatically different for the older set when he graduates to senior citizenship. His generation, he is convinced, is throbbing with more energy, more curiosity, more fire, than those who have gone before. By the time the ambitious members of his generation dip more than their toes into their 60s, staying in one location will not suit them, he says. To put his feelings bluntly, Mr. Rose believes that one of Culver City’s proudest institutions, the Senior Center, will become outmoded. “Spending day after day there probably will be too confining,” said the Councilman.

The wealthy Culver City businessman/politician Albert Vera, target of a defamation lawsuit by a police officer, “essentially” has refused to answer 12 of the 13 questions put to him — under oath — during the discovery phase, the officer’s attorney told thefrontpageonline.com on Friday morning. “Mr. Vera is making an effort to avoid the day of reckoning,” said Terry Goldberg. “He is ducking, just hiding the ball. It’s a lot of mumbo jumbo.” The lawyer said the single question Mr. Vera satisfactorily completed was inarguably simple. Declining to answer that one, said Mr. Goldberg, would have been virtually impossible.

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City Councilman Steve Rose will file two procedural complaints with his colleagues at Monday’s 7 p.m. meeting, and he will tack on a separate suggestion that he hopes will allow him to score a rare 3 to 0 sweep. For rudimentary reasons rooted in his personal philosophy as the only Republican on the Council, Mr. Rose says that City Hall is being an expensive busybody again. Midway through his second four-year term, he is hoping to dramatically alter policies on public notification and proclamations. Too much money is “wasted” every week, he contends, on notifying certain segments of the community that an item of special interest to them will be on the City Council agenda. Mr. Rose is certain to be engaged in a duel by Mayor Gary Silbiger who has fought for four years to expand public notification.

Disappointed that their carefully planned model protest at last week’s City Council meeting did not make a dent at the next bargaining session, the frustrated leaders of the Culver City Employees Assn. today are mulling their choices. No progress was reported in stalled negotiations from last Thursday’s session. Leaders are not yet sure what their posture will be for the next meeting on Tuesday. One union member who spoke up was not optimistic. “The atmosphere right now is not constructive,” she said. The logjam revolves around the city’s introduction of a health benefits cost-sharing plan whereby all union members would pay 5 percent. The Employees Association is resisting on the grounds that its members are the lowest paid of the city’s six unions. In a compromise strategy, the 400-member union is asking the city to exempt its 172 retirees from the cost-sharing scheme. Eschewing ambiguity, City Hall said no. “We are making a reasonable request,” a union member told thefrontpageonline.com. “For one of our retirees, a secretary who made $30,000 a year, to pay 5 percent, it is a hardship compared to, say, Chief Montanio or Chief Burck, who made well over $100,000 a year. They can afford it. We can’t.”

Dr. Ben Hulkower, a very funny psychologist who moved to Venice not long ago, was so excited when he called a friend on Monday night that he could not bring himself to pick up the telephone. Choosing to communicate by speaker phone, his muffled voice sounded as if he were calling from a remote cave in Indonesia. His message was barely decipherable. “You have got to come to our 4th of July Block Party,” he thundered through the static. “It is a fabulous time. It’s a potluck affair that starts in mid-afternoon. Goes on for five, six, maybe seven hours. We have the most unusual street on the Westside, probably in Los Angeles. Warren Avenue is a beautiful example of cultural diversity working. Families and singles live on this block. Most of us know each other, and we get along as if we really were family. There is something delightfully old-fashioned about the way the people on this block live. Don’t tell me that people from so many different cultures can’t get along.”