In a fascinating process likely to be fueled by nerve-wracking intensity and emotion, nearly one dozen department heads from City Hall will get acquainted with the candidates around 2 o’clock on Tuesday afternoon.
This portion of the day is carefully scripted.
Along with Chief Administrative Officer Jerry Fulwood, the department heads will meet in an assembly setting with the finalists.
Ad-Libbing Is Not Encouraged
On Monday, each interrogator expects to receive a packet from Serena Wright, the Interim Personnel Director, outlining his or her precise role in the exploratory session. Along with sketches of biographical information about the candidates, the packet will contain a list of questions that Ms. Wright has prepared.
The afternoon has been characterized as a kind of bull session, but make no mistake, the program is sharply structured.
The department heads will follow their scripts. They may ask follow-up questions. But most of the probing inquiries will have been laid out ahead of time.
Notably, this is a crucial, but not a binding, moment in the winnowing process.
Not everyone, however, has a mental catalogue of Mr. Davies, the most familiar personality on the finals list.
Fire Chief Jeff Eastman has been through this routine a few times. One might think that since he has logged twenty-eight years with the Fire Dept. and Mr. Davies has twenty-five with the police, they would know each other pretty well.
They don’t. “I know Hank, of course,” Mr. Eastman said. “But we never have worked together.”
During the nearly three decades that the retired Ted Cooke was the Police Chief, he was the dominant figure, publicly and privately, of the department.
Anyone who was not named Cooke didn’t get outside very often, was the way one veteran described Mr. Cooke’s grip on the department.
The candidates, arriving in Culver City after taking fairly different career paths, will be trying to make a favorable, enduring imprint on the department head each one most effectively connects with.
That way, when the City Council does dinner around 5:30 on Tuesday afternoon with department heads to solicit their recommendations, each candidate hopes someone will lobby rigorously on his or her behalf.
For the sake of the candidates’ self-confidence, whether strong or marginal, sources say it is best for the egos of all of them that they are not around when department heads individually hand their recommendations and reasons over to the City Council.
You Don’t Want to Hear It
“The sizeups can be pretty gruesome,” said one insider who has watched previous processes from a safe distance. “People really let everything hang out,”
Meeting with department heads has been deemed a critical step in choosing a Police Chief, in no small way to offer hints as to how they would get along with each other.
A source told thefrontpageonline.com that since the City Council members have day jobs, more or less, and don’t interact with the department heads on a daily basis, it is important for the department heads to size up the three persons who seek to join their exclusive little circle.
Following the dinner business session, Mr. Davies, Ms. Seabrooks and the third candidate will stand before the City Council, and Mr. Fulwood, one more time.
Presumably, Mayor Albert Vera, Vice Mayor Gary Silbiger, and Council members Carol Gross, Alan Corlin and Steve Rose will enter their final session with an unfogged view of the most desirable candidate.
Even before they drill the finalists one last time.
Sometime past the shank of the evening, the Council will be polled. By a simple majority, the new Police Chief will be selected.
The safest bet is that the Council vote will not be unanimous.
Mr. Davies is believed to need only one more vote to win, but that could be as difficult to achieve as walking up a mountain backward.
Insiders have been quick to say that just because Council members have by far the greatest familiarity with the twenty-five year department veteran Mr, Davies, that does not make him a cinch winner.
They are stratified often on routine issues.
Mr. Davis, a candidate the last time there was a Police Chief opening two years ago, hopes that he was forwarded to the championship round because some Council members may have seen a new side to him.
Popular with his men and women in the department, he is the smiling face of the department to many Culver City residents.
For all of his congeniality on the job, Mr. Davies is a serious person away from the job. His reading runs heavily toward non-fiction. He just finished “The Great Influenza,” about the deadly plague of 1918.
When the candidate field was being halved on Thursday night, one of the illuminating questions that helped recommenders make up their minds was this one:
“Give me an example of an emergency situation where you were the go-to person.”
More simply, how do you perform in an emergency?
The case of Ms. Seabrooks is enigmatic for some persons at City Hall.
For the second time in three years, she is a finalist in Culver City even though sources stubbornly maintain that, at the age of forty-four, she is the heir apparent to Santa Monica Chief James T. Butts Jr. whenever he decides to step aside.
Her presence here for the second time, after stoutly insisting in January she would not be a candidate, is the more puzzling because she figures to take a pay cut if selected. That situation is less clear than before since the news emerged that the salary schedule for the new Police Chief will receive a hefty boost.