Council Retreat to Analyze Strains : West Hollywood Attempts a Burbank Kind of Cure

Modesto did it, and nobody raised an eyebrow.

Irvine did it, and no one said boo.

But when the five City Council members and the city manager of the fledgling town of West Hollywood went off to the Santa Barbara Sheraton for one of those interpersonal communications retreats last weekend, it was checked off as one more “unusual” item on the agenda of the nation’s first city with a homosexual City Council majority.

Compared to some of the ordinances the city has drafted--rigorous rent controls, gay rights, spousal privileges for registered homosexual or heterosexual partners--the weekend retreat was as middle American as, well, Burbank, whose officials went through such a session in recent years, according to the woman who runs the program.

But West Hollywood, a city priding itself on accommodating varieties of life styles, did go into the weekend with a few differences--beyond the fact that the sessions could not begin until 8 p.m. Saturday so one of the councilmen, an Orthodox Jew, would not violate the Sabbath.

A couple of nights before, the council had heard testimony on its ordinance to bar discrimination against AIDS victims, and two of its three gay council members ostensibly settled a tense, ongoing power dispute over who would be the next mayor.

Those kinds of strains sent them to Santa Barbara in the first place.

“We recognized we have difficulty functioning as a team and we realized we had to deal with that,” said Councilman John Heilman, who now believes he will succeed Mayor Valerie Terrigno in the high-profile mayoral spot this week. At least “it was made pretty clear that I should get ready for a party.”

Terrigno supporters had circulated petitions to extend her term past the agreed-upon Aug. 1 changeover.

“You put five people in a room there are bound to be clashes. It’s been particularly difficult for us,” said Heilman, because “we have been subject to intense media attention,” and the kind of political infighting that might be run-of-the-mill in any other city was magnified in West Hollywood.

“A lot of people would like to see us fail. Any division or any battle was suddenly blown out of proportion,” he said.

Hence, the retreat, which reportedly cost the city about $4,000--half of it the fee for Coeleen Kiebert of Sentient Systems in Soquel. She and her husband, David Jones, have run such sessions for businesses for 15 years, and more recently for cities such as Palm Springs and Visalia.

From 8 p.m. Saturday to past midnight, and for 12 hours on Sunday, in a conference room whose straight-backed chairs drove a few people to sit on the floor now and again, the six talked out their problems and concerns using techniques such as “the fishbowl,” where two people sit in chairs in the middle of the room and talk, while the others listen and can “cut in” like on a dance floor when one of the pair moves off, Kiebert explained.

“For anybody who has not been through one of these things, I can say it is real hard work,” said Councilman Steve Schulte. “It is not a ‘touchy-feely’ session.”

“I think that I did not expect them to be working so well together,” said Kiebert, who had interviewed each and given them questionnaires beforehand. Until the incorporation election, the council members had “really got together” in their campaign for cityhood. Afterward “they had lost something they had had with each other before, and they regained that this weekend.”

“We worked on developing skills we need to work on,” said Heilman. “I think the big thing was communication, that we need to develop better communication skills.” The weekend was not, he said, “a judgmental type thing.”

“It was exhausting,” he added, “and I think draining in some respects but really important. I think we all learned a lot about each other and about things we can do individually and collectively.”