I Don't Want to Write About Last Night's Meeting
Ojai City Council Series Part XVII
It was long and hard and filled with painful content.
This is Part XVII of my continuing series on Ojai Politics. (If you’re just coming into this series, you can start here with Part I - Pluto Misogyny Showdown at City Hall)
I got there early because I knew this would be another meeting populated by two big groups of people, one there to again demand a Ceasefire resolution from the council and one there to share comments about the unhoused community living in flimsy tents on the grounds of the city hall campus in their neighborhood and their feelings about a proposed grant application to create something more sustainable and permanent for them at that site.
The doors were locked with a sign that said they would be opened at 5:45. There was a line of people ahead of me. When the doors were opened and I walked in I saw that there were still plenty of seats available, and as I got closer I saw coats and other items thrown over the empty chairs.
AND I GOT MAD!
“No! Not cool to be saving seats! Someone move your stuff so I can sit down!” And someone did.
30 minutes into the meeting, I saw a regular walk in and sit in one of the seats being saved for him. Gross, I see what you did there.
Seriously, people, this is not junior high. If you can not get your ass there on time, then you should sit outside or in the vestibule. I don’t care how important you think you are.
Wearing my own junior high school costume, after securing my seat with my coat, I stomped up to the front and told on everyone to Weston Montgomery, our interim deputy city clerk and records manager. He was not having it from me, and, well, I don’t blame him. Sorry, Weston, I hope my apology makes its way to you. This was not my finest moment.
But PEOPLE! Come on!
There was also a velvet rope line stationed well in front of the dais for the first time, separating the public from the council. This is due to the disruptions of the Ceasefire Now group and those opposed to them over our past few meetings. I get it, and yet, I don’t like the feel of it. In our small town, the fact that our city council feels the need to create a safety barrier between them and us makes me very sad. It also distances them from us and makes them feel less accessible. I am not opposed to them doing this, I am just sharing my thoughts about it and sad that it’s come to this.
Mayor Stix read a statement emphasizing the need for the council to get city business done at the top of the meeting and reiterated these points again later while thanking everyone for being there and using their voices. She also gave clear guidelines on behavior, one warning for crossing the line, and then an ouster by the police presence there which was stronger than usual.
Spoiler alert: No one had to be escorted out, but at the end of the last vote around 11:30pm, the Ceasefire Now group all stood and walked to the rope line. The Mayor banged her gavel and said, “Excuse me, we are still having a meeting.” They ignored her as one of their members began reciting the names and ages of children murdered in Gaza. This went on for quite some time, so long in fact, that members of the council left. I finally did as well and ran into Councilperson Francina (no longer mayor pro tem, more on that in a moment). She and I had a lovely exchange, and then three Sheriff’s vehicles pulled up to the building.
“Uh oh,” I said.
Their presence proved to be unnecessary. I mean, I think it did. I don’t know what happened inside.
Back to the beginning.
Public comment was largely comprised of the Ceasefire Now group demanding the council put their item back on a future agenda and vote on it, “as you promised us!” I did not hear any responsibility taken for their part in shutting down the meeting on December 20th, the special meeting which had been called to address this. I heard blame from both sides, once again.
Ten people were heard from and then the agenda began with a return to public comment after the first agenda item.
There was some back and forth with the Arts Commission and approval of their grants. Grants that were slated to be approved by the city to local artists have now been put on hold for two weeks, as the council evaluates. Mayor Pro Tem Whitman recused himself from any voting due to having family members on the list of awardees.
Big news - we have a new city manager! Welcome, Ben Harvey!!! There were zero public comments in the room regarding his hiring and two on Zoom. They both were people who had worked with him in Pacific Grove, one of them was the police chief there, and they were offering their praise of him and congratulations to both our community and him along with their gratitude. This offsets the dude who called in from Zoom last week from P.G. offering a bunch of unfounded statements about Harvey meant to discredit him. We all smelled the rat in that one, and even those who are sometimes taken by this kind of manipulation were not, or if they were, they were not at the meeting.
Ben Harvey got up and said a few words. So far so good.
Carl Alameda also got some props, gratitude, and applause for stepping into the Interim City Manager position when it was suddenly vacated in the middle of a closed session by our former Interim City Manager who had only been with us for a few months.
Back to public comments.
The one comment that resonated the most as to why it was appropriate for our city council to take up the ceasefire resolution, other than the murders and destruction, was the fact that the biggest source of revenue in our valley is the Ojai Valley Inn and Spa which is owned by the Crown family, large investors in weapons manufacturing. They are 10% owners of General Dynamics, a weapons manufacturer that has been supplying the IDF.
A local interfaith minister got up to say that some members of the two groups had been meeting together. I was sitting next to one of the main Ceasefire organizers and asked her if she had been invited. She had not.
I wasn’t going to speak during public comment, but this piece of information inspired me to take action. If our community members with opposing views can not even get into a room with one another and discuss, including listening, how on Earth can we demand the same in a land far from here?
So, I said some things along those lines and asked that they start speaking directly to one another as opposed to using the council meetings to do this. The council took a break at that point, and I connected the woman I had been sitting next to with the minister.
After the break, we returned to what played out as the only real drama between council members of the night. The issue at hand was the selection of a new mayor pro tempore, the honorific given to the council member who will serve in place of the mayor if the need were to arise. For the last year, Councilmember Francina has served as our mayor pro tem and traditionally it’s been a rotating position through the councilmembers.
Councilmember Rule made a motion to reappoint Councilmember Francina. Francina seconded. She made her case and closed with, “Of course if anyone else would like the position, I won’t go home crying.”
Councilmember Lang said that she agreed that Francina had done a great job and on her assumption that they would be rotating she had come into the meeting intending on proposing Councilmember Mayor Pro Tem Whitman for the position.
Mayor Stix expressed her gratitude to Francina for her service and hard work and then made a substitute motion to Rule’s proposing Mayor Pro Tem Whitman for the position.
Whitman seconded, so the substitute motion would supersede the original motion made by Rule in support of Francina.
Start your engines!
“I am going to have to say something here. I personally do not feel that Councilmember Whitman is an appropriate Mayor Pro Tem,” Rule said sharply.
Mayor Stix tried to interject and Rule cut her off as she got louder and more angry.
It devolved there into a slew of accusations against him by her.
Mayor Stix again tried to take back control and again Rule got louder and more forceful.
She kept making this comment, “He barely survived recall.”
In actuality, a petition was circulated to put a recall of him on the spring ballot (CA primary election) which failed. So, to be clear, he did not “just barely survive a recall”. The recall did not even happen. It did not make it to the ballot due to being rejected by the Ventura County Clerk-Recorder/Registrar of Voters after having thrown out 38 of the signatures taking the number of signatures needed below the required 333.
Francina felt that both Whitman and Rule should be off the table due to both of them being controversial and that Councilmember Lang would be the right choice.
Then Rule and Stix went back and forth after Stix disagreed with some of Rule’s accusations saying they were not all factual and Rule claimed Stix was calling her a liar and demanded to know which ones were not factual.
“Nothing I said was untrue,” said Rule
“Yes it was,” responded Whitman, coming to his defense.
Then Lang wavered on her support of Whitman commenting on the fact that he and Rule do not get along and asked him to speak on this.
“Yeah, I’ve made a big effort not to confront Councilmember Rule, but she made a personal attack on me and I only said a few words which is ‘I don’t agree that she’s being truthful when when she says the things she says about me’.”
This all started during the very first meeting of this council, a closed session, one year ago. The gauntlet was laid then and was a byproduct of the hate-filled election that had preceded it. This has bled into every meeting, created lawsuits against the city, a lawsuit against Rule by a group of citizens, initiated a recall attempt against Whitman, and continual smearing of all of them on social media and in the press, although the press seems to take more of a biased position against the mayor and Whitman.
The personal animosity demonstrated between Whitman and Rule is an encapsulation of this energy, and I am going to ask them both here to stop. I don’t care any longer who is right or who is wrong, who said what and who did not, who potentially violated the Brown Act, and who did not. I do not care.
Please, for the health and sake of our community, move on and decide to work together. And when the Ceasefire Now group and those opposed act in the ways that they do, perhaps view it as a reflection of your behavior.
Long story short (I know, too late) Whitman is our new Mayor Pro Tem as a third substitute motion by Francina to appoint Lang failed due to no one seconding it. Lang was the deciding vote, as she often is when the split between Whitman/Stix and Rule/Francina happens.
But wait, there’s more, and this one is big. It’s the only thing I was planning on commenting on at this meeting when I arrived.
The issue in front of them was whether or not to approve the submission of a grant to the state for funds to create transitional housing and services for our unhoused population. The proposed location for the grant’s purposes is the parking lot at Kent Hall which is located adjacent to the buildings which house the council chamber. However, this location may or may not be the actual location for the housing if Ojai is awarded the grant. The meeting was not about the location but about yes or no to submitting the grant by the January 31st deadline. There is a second round, deadline March 31st, and yet funding is capped for this program, and the concern by those advocating for it is that the longer Ojai waits, the less likely we’ll be to get the funds.
There were more speakers for this item than any other, so speaking time was cut to two minutes per person. Many of the people living in the neighborhood spoke out against pursuing both the grant and the location with some supporting the grant and pushing that the housing be created elsewhere.
CA passed a law that states that if a city does not have adequate shelter for the unhoused (ours does not), unhoused people must be allowed to camp on city property. The tent camp at our city hall campus grew out of a need to move the unhoused from Libbey Park (in the center of town) to this location, still in the middle of town, but a couple of blocks south into a neighborhood, a neighborhood that houses our police station and city council campus which sit directly across the street from one another.
So here’s the deal, grant or no grant, that tent community will not be moved unless the city has adequate space for them.
The neighbors spoke about experiencing increasing disturbances by the unhoused, some displaying compassion and concern for them and some not at all, a couple expressed some fear, and too few seemed aware of their privilege in any visceral way. They were also upset that they had been given no official notice from the city about any of this, and this does seem like an actual problem to me.
I am hopeful our new city manager will implement better and more regular outreach and communication with the citizens of Ojai. I also hope that the citizens start coming to more meetings and getting involved. None of what was happening was news to me as I have been at almost every meeting now for seven months and have heard about these plans for this site and this grant more than once.
I got up and said, “I wholeheartedly support moving forward with the grant. Please. I’ve said it before, until our most vulnerable are cared for, none of us are cared for. We are all one major crisis away from being unhoused……
“…..The number one reason for homelessness is money (I got a little loud here). It’s fff (I almost swore) money, excuse me. I think it’s completely appropriate that the unhoused be here on our government space as a direct result of our systemic failures here, nationally, at a state level, citywide, and countywide. We have failed. It should be in our faces.
“I am sorry for the people who have had disturbances, but the plan will seem to alleviate a lot of those disturbances as people are moved into more comfortable spaces, which those transitional tents will be, and then as they’re moved into actual buildings…..
“…….Being unhoused, it creates a level of powerlessness that you can not imagine unless you have experienced it yourself, and submitting this grant is one step towards housing these people. The location can be handled. This is the first step. It moves the energy. Thank you.”
As I sat, I said to a friend who was sitting behind me who was there to speak in opposition to the location of the proposed site, “I still love you!”
”I still love you too!” she smiled at me as we both started laughing.
Mayor Pro Tem Whitman wanted to wait until the second round to submit. His concerns were that we have a new city manager starting on Monday who may be coming in with other and better ideas, the incomplete budget, and the lack of information about how much this may cost the city. Even though funded by the grant, the funding is only for two years of operation costs at which point the city would need to either look for another grant, pay out of pocket, or charge rents to the tenants. Most are above 61 years of age and are receiving some social security. What they could be charged is capped at 30% of their monthly income.
Children and our aged population falling into the abyss of the ever-widening wealth gap here and everywhere.
Whitman kept referencing our past mayor and past city manager as people he’d been speaking with, and I felt bothered by this. Later on, City Attorney Summers would remind them all sharply, as other names were mentioned as well, that only the five of them were currently elected to serve.
Then it happened.
“I agree with Miss Herold when she says this moves the energy in the proper way,” said Councilmember Rule as she expressed her support for moving ahead with the grant application process. More than one head flipped in my direction as Rule used my name in agreement.
She was ready to make a motion to apply for the grant and include an option for the Ojai Valley Green Coalition (members Betsy Van Leit and Kathy Nolan had suggested creating and facilitating a stakeholders group comprised of neighbors, other community members, unhoused community members, etc to collaborate on the issue of housing) to be formally granted/hired to do this.
Francina seconded it also saying that Lang could second if she liked.
Councilmember Lang spoke in support due to the flexibility and that this grant would not limit them from working with the county and/or seeking funding options elsewhere. She also said she thinks we need a better plan than what has currently been constructed and yet this does not prevent her from voting “yes” on submitting the grant.
Mayor Stix thanked everyone for their incredible hard work from Ruth Miller who spearheads the unhoused task force in Ojai to Betsy Van Leit to George Gaines to Jennifer Harkey, the program director of Ventura County’s Continuum of Care, Dignity Moves (the company that would build the housing and create services), Chris, Jeff, Joanne “incredible people”, Jayn and Meagan from Help of Ojai, Carl Alameda (Interim Ojai City Manager), and Mark Scott (former Interim Ojai City Manager).
Then she did something I was surprised at, she spoke in support of waiting until the next round of funding due to the issues already mentioned, questions due to budget, the county’s involvement, the location of the site, the neighbors’ concerns, and the fact that our new city manager starts on Monday and the importance of his input as this will fall largely to him.
Francina pushed making the point that waiting could mean Ojai won’t get the grant and that there is no harm or foul in applying now.
Whitman talked about negotiating positions regarding the county and how if we were funded we may be in a weaker position whereas Rule believed the opposite to be true, that if we approach the county with a plan and funds in hand they might be more likely to chip in. I see both points of view.
Lang, “This is money. This is grant money coming into our city for a problem that we have. And, I agree the plan needs work. We need to figure this out, we need to work with the county, we need to work with the neighbors, we need a solid plan…..Plan aside, the money will give us the flexibility to create the plan…..”
More back and forth and more names were summoned and this was when Summers said the thing I mentioned above about the five of them being the only ones currently elected and called the vote.
It passed and the grant will be submitted with Francina, Lang, and Rule for and Stix and Whitman against.
For the first time, I was in disagreement with the mayor while agreeing with Rule. It’s opposite world. Maybe this is Pluto in Aquarius and the last dregs of Uranus in retrograde? Maybe the city council member who is also an astrologer can explain this to me?????
You know what happened next because I already told you above like five hours ago when you started reading this article.
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