ARB Vote Invalidated

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

Sept. 3 -- Aside from the surprise appearance by a termed-out board member who returned to the dais for the night, it seemed a routine matter when the Architectural Review Board reelected its chair and vice chair to another one-year term last month.

But the votes that reelected Sergio Zeballos and Joan Charles, as chair and vice-chair respectively, will have to be revisited after City staff realized that the item on the August 4 agenda was noticed as a “discussion regarding future election of chairperson and vice-chair” and not an action to be taken that night.

The issue was brought to the attention of City officials by Councilman Herb Katz, who filed a complaint with the City Attorney. Katz not only questioned the wording of the item, he challenged the participation of Rick Abelson, who formally retired a month earlier and has not yet been replaced after serving the maximum eight years on the board.

“It (the agenda) said future election, and 5 minutes after 8 isn’t the future," said Katz, an architect who has served on numerous boards and commissions, including the ARB.

"Boards and commissions don’t usually change chairs unless the new board is appointed or the old board is reappointed, and in this case we (the City Council) did not appoint a replacement for the old landscape architect,” Katz said.

Abelson -- who Zeballos said happened to be at City Hall the evening of the vote -- had officially stepped down and was “a lame duck” who shouldn't have voted, Katz said. (Abelson did not return calls for comment.)

At the following meeting August 18, staff member Ava Pecherzewski took full responsibility for the snafu, which Planning Department officials contend was an error.

The vote is being revisited “out of an abundance of caution” said Jay Trevino, planning department manager. “I don’t know if any procedures were broken. The intent of reagendizing the matter was to make sure that all proper procedures were followed.”

Zeballos and Charles both noted that the discussion item had been on the agenda for months in anticipation of the pending appointment of a new member to replace Abelson, who had said he did not plan to return to the board and was given a small going away party on June 16.

When Abelson showed up to the August 4 meeting, the board, which was sick of waiting for the City Council to make an appointment, seized the opportunity, Zeballos said.

“The thing is we have no way of knowing when the City Council will appoint a new person,” Zeballos said. “Two years ago, we were short one person for four months, so we don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

Zeballos, who has served on the board for seven years, said he did not realize the item was not properly worded on the agenda.

“I was not made aware of it," said Zeballos, who first placed the discussion item on the June 16 agenda. "It’s obvious that the planning department was not aware of it, or they would have raised a flag. Obviously if they would have said we shouldn’t do it, we wouldn’t have done it.”

Abelson, Zeballos said, was “just lending a hand. It’s kind of expected of board members to stay on till their spot gets filled. It’s been like that for the last two years.”

Zeballos added that because a new chair is elected every year, the election item is “always under discussion. It happens every year like that.”

Charles also saw nothing wrong with voting on the item.

“An election was called and I voted," Charles said. "If we have to do it over, then we’ll do it over.

“This is a big tempest in a stupid little teapot, and the people who are pushing this have their own weird little agenda,” Charles added. “It’s all part of the idiocy of Santa Monica politics where people volunteer and work hard and people crap all over them.”