Mr. Corlin was further angered by Mr. Silbiger’s numerous accusations that the voting for new Light Rail Committee members was illegal, and that he still considered himself the legitimate committee delegate.
Who Wants To Be on the Committee?
The long-striding Mr. Corlin has coveted a place on the Light Rail Committee ever since April of last year when Mr. Silbiger was appointed to serve as the delegate and Carol Gross as the alternate. For Ms. Gross, City Hall regarded her appointment as a natural progression from her broad-based communal activism, especially in the area of light rail. For Mr. Silbiger, it was a relatively new experiment. He quickly seemed to develop an affinity for the subject.
The back-story is that Mr. Corlin and Ms. Gross probably are the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable supporters of light rail in Culver City. Light rail may not have been at the top of Mr. Silbiger’s agenda, but he appreciates the prestige of the assignment, and he is loath to surrender it, legally or illegally.
How Culver City came to have two bitterly opposed two-person delegations to the light rail concept known as the Joint Powers Authority is a shaggy dog story that will not be officially settled until the next scheduled Council meeting on Monday, May 8. On that date, City Atty. Carol Schwab, and possibly other legal sources from as far away as Sacramento, will issue ruling(s) on which team is to be validated.
A veritable jungle of disagreements and middlingly important details have led to the present crisis. Mr. Corlin, more of an extravert than the mayor, was fuming on Tuesday over several actions by the mayor. Mr. Silbiger, slightly more reserved, appeared just as disturbed that Mr. Corlin was assertedly trying to outflank him.
How It All Began
To start, roughly, at the beginning, Mr. Silbiger launched his term as Mayor on Monday night by declaring there was going to be a considerable change in the Council’s way of doing business. Instead of determining committee assignments as they were listed in the standard agenda distributed to the capacity crowd, Mr. Silbiger gave each of his four colleagues a worksheet that rearranged the listings. Mr. Corlin heavily objected. “Gary says he is a man of the people, but here he was in a first move as Mayor shutting out the people,” Mr. Corlin said. “Nobody in the audience would be able to follow what we were doing.” He made a vigorous objection and then retreated.
Gazing in the direction of Ms. Schwab, Mr. Corlin, for purposes of legal clarity, asked, significantly not randomly, about voting for delegates for the Light Rail Committee. He did not seem to receive an immediate answer.
Mr. Silbiger was surprised, he said, because last April he and Ms. Gross believed they had been appointed to four-year (not the usual one-year) terms.
In the public copy of the agenda, there were openings for a delegate and an alternate, the beliefs of Mr. Silbiger and Ms. Gross notwithstanding. Mr. Silbiger said it was erroneous for the openings to be listed because the positions already were filled. With Mr. Corlin serving as the engineer, he nominated himself as the delegate and rookie Councilman Scott Malsin as the alternate. By a three to two vote — Steve Rose, Mr. Malsin and Mr. Corlin — the Corlin-Malsin team appeared to snuff out objections by Ms. Gross and Mr. Silbiger as to the legality of procedures.
For long minutes, there was a hard-edged triangular debate among Ms. Schwab, Mr. Silbiger and Mr. Corlin regarding the legality of what just happened. Ms. Schwab appeared to lean in the direction of Mr. Corlin’s position, which Mr. Corlin was prepared to accept and Mr. Silbiger emphatically was not.
Postscript
Mr. Corlin warned the Mayor that “if he makes the appointments that he talked about at the end of the meeting, I will rescind them and open up the process to the full Council.”