3 Weeks of Business as Usual
This entry was posted on 9/19/2006 7:54 PM and is filed under General.
In the spirit of limiting this discourse to examples of when the City Council doesn't listen to the citizens of Glendale, I won't catelog all the details of the last 3 Council meetings, but I do want to point out a few interesting facts.
During the September 5th CC meeting, Mayor Weaver went on a great rant over being accused of misuse of City resources by getting free police support for his commercial Miss Asia USA Pagent (he's on their executive board, and it is a for-profit commercial operation). He requested police services, and rather than using paid officers, they assigned unpaid reservists, and didn't have to charge the pagent anything. Weaver went on a rampage about how people like Barry Allen and Herbert Molano just talk too much, ask for too much public information and are just trying to micromanage the City - Weaver threatened "to put a stop to it" meaning he was going to try to infringe on their 1st Amendment rights somehow.
Of course, these people are just putting the pressure on the Council because these all too common examples of the appearance of impropriety are making people wonder if there is enough visibility into the CIty Council's back room dealings to insure public protection from waste and fraud.
Weaver's hostility and his defensive rants speak for themselves. Perhaps the best summary of this evening was done by Will Rogers - everyone should read his latest column at http://WillRogersHome.com.
The next week (9/12), more of Weaver's hostile, pissy and intimidating behavior was exhibited - that's the rule rather than the exception these days - he's sarcastic, intolerant of the public and of his fellow councilmen for that matter, and it's obvious the pressure is getting to him. I think he knows his days are numbered.
He has gone overboard to limit the public input to the City Council - he has often moved Oral Communications to the end of the City Council meeting to make sure a lot of people leave early, he often limits speakers to 2 minutes now, and he continues to treat speakers like a despot and tried his best to make people feel like they will be taken out back and shot if they dare to question his authority. We seriously do not need Councilmen like Weaver.
Math Quiz for Mr. Army Corps of Engineers: Weaver treated Barry Allen to a lengthy chastisement about his continued pressure on the City government, and claimed that Mr. Allen's 117 public information act requests cost the City $250,000 - let's see... that's $2100+ per request - let's say city employees cost $100 per hour when you take salary, benefits, and all overhead into account - that means it is taking 21 staff hours to respond to these requests?? Is that the correct arithimetic Dave?
If the information is supposed to be public and made available to the public upon request, and it takes over 20 staff hours to rustle up the information, then our City Clerk has a lousy system and Mr. Weaver should be worrying about the inefficiencies of his own City staff. (So should we!)
Or, of course, it's likely that Mr. Weaver is just making up numbers to guilt-trip people into NOT requesting public information.
(I wonder if the same quality of Weaver-reasoning and incompetent management style in the Army Corps of Engineers had anything to do with the lousy levee design in New Orleans? Just a catty thought...)
Last week, the CUP for a house in the Chevy Chase area was given its final approval - interestingly enough, a Realtor Rick Barnes got up and congratulated the City Council for overriding the concerns of the local residents and allowing the project - a project he had nothing whatsoever to do with. He must have several of these substandard lots in his pipeline and felt that kissing up to the Council was good politics. We need to watch out for this character.. he also made fun of Barry Allen; an obvious sycophantic ploy - and Weaver fawned right back at him the whole time..
Tonight's CC meeting took up the issue of Banquet Hall outdoor grilling. Very interesting - Mr. Yousefian and Mr. Manoukian obviously have some vested interest in Banquet Halls (who are all going to give them free rent for their election campaign parties and functions), since they both argued against the regulations proposed by the Planning staff - they laughed and make fun of serious Planning Commission recommendations that required the grill operators to put in protections to keep grease out of the storm drains and rain out of the sewer system, and Yousefian made a point of criticizing the Planning Commission - but both the Fire Department and the Public Works people set him straight and explained that this is State law and protecting the sewers and storm drains is a good idea.
They finally gave in and accepted the ordinance for introduction, but Yousefian and Manoukian were hard over against any limit on hours of operation - which means a commercial operation could be running 24x7, and to hell with the local residents. After all, it's more important for their Banquet Hall pals to make money than it is to protect the residents of the City.
Fortunately, a speaker from "The Ethnic Advisory Council to the AQMD" (bet you never would have guessed there was such a thing!) got up and informed the public that the AQMD will enforce any complaints about smoke caused by outdoor barbeques at the banquet halls, and that people can just call 1-800-CutSmog to lodge a complaint.
So it looks like illegal outdoor grilling will be made legal, no restrictions on hours of operation, no CUPs required for grills smaller than 10 square feet, and large commercial operations only need a CUP if they are closer than 200 feet from a residential neighborhood. (Have you ever seen Edith Fuentes deny a CUP?)
This is all either a non-issue, or we'll see a lot of calls to the AQMD by affected residents - I hope they all get the information they need to protect themselves. Mostly the evening was just another amusing example of how special interests have been allowed to take over our Council and how dysfunctional a parlimentarian Mr. Weaver is. We have a lot of work to do between now and April 2007...
A final thought - a recent movie had a great line in it: "People should not be afraid of the Government, the Government should be afraid of the People!" Should be the slogan of Glendale Alliance!
