Fulwood Lingers ‘in a Twilight Zone’

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

[Editor’s Note: In an attempt to unscramble public confusion over the status of Culver City chief executive Jerry Fulwood and the implementation of the new City Charter, City Atty. Carol Schwab will present a paper at the outset of Monday night’s City Council meeting. Called “A Summary of the Tasks and Timelines,” it is intended to describe and define the blueprint to be followed by the City Council in the coming weeks.]
 
      More than three weeks after an election vanquished Jerry Fulwood’s old job (title), the City Council needs to decide what it is going to do about Mr. Fulwood, former Mayor Ed Wolkowitz said yesterday. He believes that “too much” weight is being assigned to changing the title of the city’s chief executive and his duties from  Chief Administrative Officer to City Manager. Nevertheless, Mr. Fulwood will languish in a twilight zone fraught with uncertainty, Mr. Wolkowitz said, until an explicit plan is laid out for him by the City Council.

87 Shopping Days Left

Ari L. NoonanSports

            An observer of the immensely self-assured School Board never will go broke betting that the gentleladies and gentlemen of the School Board are acting deviously, out of self-interest. They don’t seem to run out of cunning. Their sense of timing is one good tick off. They give chutzpah a bad name. They never tire of waiting until everyone in the room has gone home before tippy-toeing toward the door, softly slipping embarrassing news underneath it, then tippy-toeing away. This off-kilter Board would have tried to teach Ray Charles sign language. They might have whispered in Helen Keller’s left ear. They would wear shorts, tee-shirt and flip-flops to see the Queen. Some members of the School Board melt into mush every time they see Dr. Laura McGaughey. She has eighty-seven days left as Superintendent of the School District before she “retires,” meaning the philanthropists on the School Board have eighty-seven shopping days left to shovel more raises into her bank account. Go, team. They are behaving like the starry-eyed teenage boy who falls into puppy love — alone.

School District Talks Back

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

            In anticipating next Friday’s mediation session with the Teachers Union over two years worth of labor contracts, the School District has issued a refutation of claims made by Union leadership. The paper, called “Facts, Not Rhetoric: The Truth About School District Teacher Compensation,” is sure to receive a loud rebuttal during Tuesday night’s 7:30 meeting of the School Board at Lin Howe School, adjacent to the regular meeting site.
 
 
Fact 1
 
            Each and every teacher in the School District will receive retiree health benefits. The Culver City Unified School District is currently offering employee-only coverage to all new employees hired on or after July 1, 2006. That means each and every teacher who retires from the District would receive retiree health benefits, though the spouses of teachers hired after July 1, 2006, would not. Current employees will continue to receive benefits according to the present contract.

Will Huge Raises Trigger a Strike?

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

• Entire Salary Schedule Below
 

                After a several month break, the Teachers Union resumed picketing on Tuesday morning in front of Culver City High School just as Union President David Mielke was raising the spectre of an unprecedented strike, possibly at the beginning of the new school term in September. In addition to the fact that the three hundred and fifty-member union has been working without a contract for the last two years and without a raise for four years, a new thorn is irritating already fuming members. The School Board has proposed raises for the School District’s sixteen-member management team, which infuriates the Union for two reasons: It is the second pay hike of the year, and four managers are scheduled to receive Enron-sized raises. In a bizarre late-hour attempt to reward District Supt. Dr. Laura McGaughey before she slips into retirement in July, the School Board is pondering a twenty-five percent pay increase, from $123,669 to $154,669. Amazingly, Dr. McGaughey’s hike is the smallest of the gigantic increases. The Director of Purchasing stands to gain a 29.4 percent raise, the Director of Security is scheduled for a 34.4 percent hike, and the Director of Child Development would gain 43.8 percent. As parents dropped off their children near the campus, a picketing teacher would reach into the car and hand the parent a two-sided flyer that urged all supporters to attend this coming Tuesday night’s School Board meeting to protest the raises that likely are unprecedented. The headline on the flyer read: “Your Teachers Need Your Help — Again.” Drivers traveling north on Elenda honked loudly in support of the Union.

You Are Unwelcome

Ari L. NoonanSports

        Senors y Senoras: The overridingly important reason that many marchers in Monday’s pro-illegal immigration  rallies are unambiguously unwelcome in my country is that they boastfully reject the quintessential American value. When their well-oiled anti-American organizers/manipulators tell them to proclaim, in English, there is no difference between illegal and legal immigration, the pathetic marchers who obey thereby forfeit any potential claim to future citizenship. The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” may be too subtle for the mobs of under-educated illegals who have thronged the Mexican border in recent years. It is, however, a critical line of demarcation for anyone wishing to become a citizen of the United States. Analagously, if a prospective convert to Catholicism would say that he believed in all precepts except the doctrine of Jesus, he probably would be rejected for enrollment. The coarseness of the character of the marchers who proudly shout the fairy-like accusation of alikeness is not to be under-estimated. This is not show business. These fiercely anti-independent thinking shouters truly embrace the crudities that they bellow. This would explain one  phenomenon of our time, how fifty-five percent of the deeply misunderstood gentlemen residing temporarily within the bowels of the County Jail came to be illegal immigrants. I submit that this alone would be justification for constructing the proposed seven-hundred mile wall along the bottom of the United States.

346 Students Were Absent

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

The scene: In the hour before day-after classes began yesterday morning, the brightly lighted, medium-sized lobby at Culver City High School was filled to capacity with students  reporting Monday absences. From behind a tall counter, Dave Sotelo, Asst. Principal for Attendance, ordered students who skipped classes for immigration rally-linked reasons to bypass the counter. They were to report directly to the appropriate classrooms, he told them.

 

 

          In spite of a stern warning letter dispatched to students and their families last Friday and again last Sunday, three hundred and forty students out of almost twenty-two hundred were absent from classes at Culver City High School on Monday, the day set aside nationwide to protest proposed immigration law reform. While the number represented a higher total of absentees than had been projected, Principal Pam Magee said the exact figure of immigration rally-related absences will not be known for a few days. (For a comparison, the number of absentees was five times higher than for a recent Monday.) “We certainly respect the students’ right for free speech,” Ms. Magee told thefrontpageonline.com yesterday. “But we also highly value education. That means that students need to be in school, in class, and working.” In the strongly worded four-hundred and thirty-word letter of warning that Ms. Magee crafted after consulting a number of persons, punishment for protest-

Car Victim Was a Hero

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

  A slender young man acting as a disk jockey at a birthday party in West Culver City for a fifteen-year-old girl apparently committed a toweringly heroic act in the blurry, shadowy seconds just before he was killed last Saturday night when run down by a car, Culver City police said. Witnesses said that the victim, thirty-one-year-old Tarek Captan of Los Angeles, was such a close friend of the hosting family that he was addressed as Uncle. In a frozen moment of unsurpassed fright in the middle of the 11900 block of Washington Boulevard, Mr. Captan seemed to have heroically spared the life of his female companion. Acting out of sheer, instinctive desperation when he spotted an oncoming car, he heaved with all the might he could summon to shove Rosalinda Kooyman, 31, out of the car’s death path. But the car, driven by Timothy Murchison, according to police, smashed into Mr. Captan’s vulnerable body. Ms. Kooyman was hospitalized with head and body injuries characterized as “not life-threatening.” The couple were said to be on their first date, and they were headed toward Ms. Kooyman’s car, on the north side of Washington Boulevard, when the accident occurred. They were among three persons crossing Washington. Witnesses said that the car in question swerved to avoid the un-named third person only to end up in the path of Mr. Captan and Ms. Kooyman.

A $5 Million Gasp

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

      The Brotman Medical Center, which seems to be taking on water faster than patients in a fade mode, almost — but not quite — pulled off the sweetheart loan of the century. The previously unheard-of formulation of a private business walking out of City Hall with a $5 million loan, unsecured, blew up on Monday night at the Redevelopment Agency meeting. So outrageous was the scheme deemed by dissenters that Agency Chair Steve Rose, a loan supporter, was not even able to call for a vote. The intense degree of sturdy opposition voiced by Mayor Gary Silbiger, Vice Chair Scott Malsin and Alan Corlin rendered Mr. Rose and Carol Gross powerless, despite impassioned pro-loan speeches. The mayor suggested that Brotman’s owners should be looking within instead of without. “Those who are in control of the hospital should have the means to raise the money themselves,” Mr. Silbiger maintained. In his opening, Mr. Corlin objected to the onetime prospect of handing over the $5 million as an outright grant “to some of the wealthiest people in the city.” He took umbrage at the notion that the owners “could take a profit while not paying us back.” Shortly afterward, the loan was temporarily salvaged. Gasping for air, the creative concept of a free loan for the only hospital in the area won the thinnest kind of reprieve.

Looks Like a Mess Ahead for Fulwood

Ari L. NoonanOP-ED

   The most sensitive subject in City Hall these mid-spring mornings is the new three-year contract of Chief Administrative Officer Jerry Fulwood. What does it mean? Is he safe? Since the Charter Reform measure passed in last month’s election, it was assumed by Mr. Fulwood’s supporters — at their peril — that he would quietly transition from CAO to City Manager, as called for in the revised Charter, whenever it is deemed to take effect. No muss or fuss. Wrong, apparently. The smartest sources inside City Hall told thefrontpageonline.com yesterday that the contract Mr. Fulwood agreed to last January did not necessarily guarantee his continued employment in the event of the passage of Charter Reform. “It really depends on how you read the contract,” a highly placed source said. “You can read it either way. It is very complicated. Certain conditions have to be met. The conditions have not yet been sorted out, and I don’t know how long it will take for that to happen.” All of this may come as a jolt to Mr. Fulwood’s supporters in and out of City Hall. When the chief executive squeezed by with a new contract by a three to two City Council vote last winter, it was broadly assumed that this would ensure his continued employment, whether Charter Reform won or lost. In defense of City Hall, no one said yeah or nay at the time of the contract agreement.

Weighing Brotman Loan

Ari L. NoonanSports

   Perhaps if we sit down together, we can deduce a proper answer to the Brotman Medical Center’s rebuffed request of City Hall for a $5 million loan. When the subject was placed on the Redevelopment Agency’s agenda once again for last night, I was reminded of the predicament of the working-class gentleman who strode into a new car agency. He needed to purchase a new model, he said, because he lived in a fashionable neighborhood, and how would it look to keep parking his eighteen-year-old Toyota in the driveway? If granted the loan, he promised that he would try to pay it back. He could not guarantee repayment but he would try.  That was good enough, said the agency. And our friend was escorted outdoors to select his car. This approximates Brotman’s position. Realistically, the hospital has little going for it, materially. Tourists are tempted to boo the condition of the campus when they drive by. But the hospital has two civically important bullets in its gun when it walks into City Hall demanding terms that would get you and me laughed into the street. Brotman is one of Culver City’s oldest enterprises, and it provides a critical service that none of our town’s many restaurants, bars, service stations or car agencies provide: They rehabilitate and heal, more or less.