After harshly reprimanding his colleagues for being hardhearted toward the working-class RV owners, unworthy of representing Culver City, he returned his gaze to the audience.
As the clock neared 11 p.m., Mr. Vera announced he would tell his wife that he had changed his mind about running, that he was re-entering the race.
Glaring toward his colleagues, Mr. Vera later told thefrontpageonline.com, “They really (ticked) me off.”
No stranger to outbursts, the mayor said he was so angry that he was inclined to vacate the dais immediately and turn the meeting over to the vice mayor. Alternately, he aimed flaming words at the City Council and then conciliatory, reassuring messages to the largely pro-RV audience.
Establishing himself at the outset of a two-hour debate as being firmly in the pro-RV camp, Mr. Vera steadily lost ground. Momentum never was on his side. The more his opposition prevailed, the more he seethed.
In a departure from respected City Council custom, Mr. Vera directly addressed the large, wrought crowd in Council Chambers numerous times.
Eschewing his presumed neutral role as the referee, he assured RV owners that somehow a compromise was within reach. He pledged to do everything necessary to forge a settlement, regardless of what his colleagues think or do.
After failing to convince the City Council that a subcommittee should be formed to help mediate the fast-burning dispute with City Hall, Mr. Vera reverted to a more familiar stance.
Spurning the notion of operating as a team player, he tried the paternal touch, which always works for him. It has a double effect of soothing the audience with a warm, rinsing feeling and convincing the majority to swing their support toward him.
Mr. Vera told the aroused RV owners that he, alone, would aggressively pursue a compromise plan. Anyone interested in making peace, he said, should telephone him or visit his store.
Skepticism Dominates Reactions
Absent from this latest decision by Mr. Vera was the awe with which last month’s shocking news was greeted. The loudest sound this time was from skeptics.
Since the mayor said he was serious, about running, Dep. City Clerk Ela Valladares was busy this morning. She verified the state’s modest signature requirements. Mr. Vera must obtain between twenty and thirty if he truly intends to become a write-in candidate on the April 11 ballot.
This morning, thefrontpageonline.com asked each of Mr. Vera’s four City Council colleagues, Do you believe he will run?
Carol Gross: “I don’t know.”
Gary Silbiger: “”Oh, gosh, you will have to ask him.”
Alan Corlin: “He is not running.”
Steve Rose: “No.”
The always-crowded Vera bandwagon may not fill up so fast. For example, Councilman Corlin called the mayor’s supposed bombshell “an interesting statement. But he is not running. I don’t see how he can.”
You need a scorecard these days to track Mr. Vera’s will-he or won’t-he calls.
Two years ago this spring, Mr. Vera told The Front Page that he would run again. Periodically, he repeated the vow to the other Culver City newspapers.
But on Jan. 13, he stunned everyone in the community when he ignored the filing deadline. The next morning, he telephoned each of his City Council teammates. He told them he was withdrawing in deference to the weakened health of his wife Ursula.
Less than four weeks later, however, Mr. Vera became emotionally entwined in the ugliest Council debate of the winter season, over where RVs should be parked. He perspired. His eyes watered. His voice occasionally quavered.
He snapped a whip at his Council teammates, bitterly accusing them of being needlessly inflexible toward RV owners who simply want to park on the city’s streets, residential and business.
For the last two months, the new RV ordinance has been hanging out in limbo. The pending law would forbid owners from parking their RVs on city streets. Sparked by a spate of recent complaints, the ordinance appears to target homeless or otherwise illegal, messy persons who are fouling neighborhoods by keeping their RVs in one place for long stretches of time.
Some residents charge that RVs generally are a source of blight. When parked, they complain, RVs block views. Unintentionally, they add, oversized vehicles can be safety hazards.
Mood of the Crowd
The crowd started out in a raucous mood. From there, their conduct deteriorated. Contrary to the code of expected demeanor at public meetings, they shouted out protests whenever the spirit moved them.
At the end of an evening when the rules of traditional conduct had taken a bizarre battering, the divided City Council voted three to two to implement the ordinance in thirty days, early March.
Meanwhile, partisans on both sides were invited to continue to send their comments to City Hall or the city’s Web site, culvercity.org.
Mayor Left No Doubt
Like ivy climbing a wall, Mr. Vera’s stentorian tones nearly shook the walls of the Council Chambers.
Twenty members of the public — split in their views —spoke during the official comment period. Plenty more than that called out abstractly, from deep in the audience, during the ensuing salty discussion.
While the two sides wrestled in sloppy mud, Mr. Vera’s rapidly expanding fury was the engine that drove the argument.
What opened as a merely tough debate soon frayed, devolving into a shaggy-edged verbal brawl with bar-room overtones. Civility seemed to surrender.
The louder the mayor’s hard-charging voice became — in defense of the RV owners — the rowdier the crowd seemed to grow.
The outcome was apparent early to all in the room. Three City Council members, Ms. Gross, who was the hardliner leading the opposing side, Mr. Rose and Mr. Corlin, plainly favored implementing the parking ban as soon as possible.
Without anything tangible to appease the increasingly upset crowd, Mr. Vera vaguely promised the pro-RV partisans a solution sometime in the future. That failed to mollify anyone.
Decorum ducked out the door and down the street. For a few minutes, it appeared that the rule of order was threatened.
In the midst of this, Mr. Vera even raised his voice to talk over his old friend Ms. Gross. She was in the twelfth minute of a presentation.
He made his voice louder. First she tried to continue. Then she got mad. Normally allies, the two flung sizzling words at each other. Mr. Vera won a few chuckles and a smattering of applause when he said Council members should be restricted to three-minute comments.
This scarcely tamed the audience. Their mood grew darker, their calls to the dais harsher. The shouts were random, regular, shrill, occasionally vulgar.
It was the kind of raw behavior that never is heard, much less tolerated, in Council Chambers.
Ms. Gross, Mr. Corlin and Mr. Rose separately admonished persons in the crowd for their verbal unruliness. But Mr. Vera never did. The audience loved him for that.
“They don’t know what they’re doing,” Bob Young, a disappointed RV owner, grumbled later. “They couldn’t even answer my question about what constitutes an oversized vehicle. They didn’t do their homework.”
COUNCIL NOTES — Monday morning, for the second time in a month, the odious smell of gasses from a nearby oil well drilling wafted up the hill to Culver Crest. Numerous emergency agencies responded…The activist Egon Monostory continued his long-running feud with Councilman Rose…Fire Chief Jeff Eastman was named to the L.A. County Emergency Medical Services Commission, a policy-making body…The Julian Dixon Library will be closed for two weeks, from Wednesday, Feb. 15, through Wednesday, March 1, to improve parking conditions…Mayor Vera privately explained what he meant at last week’s Town Hall meeting when he linked the term “blackmail” to last October’s vote on the two mobile home parks on Grandview Boulevard. Mr. Rose strongly criticized him for such an incendiary word, and wondered aloud what he was talking about. Blackmail, said Mr. Vera, referred to the residents of the two parks who changed their minds about whether they wanted to be included in a city redevelopment project. When they chose to be included and became mad when the Redevelopment Agency voted to exclude them, that felt like blackmail, the mayor said…