Hopeful Signs of a Truce on Thousand Oaks Council

Can this marriage be saved?

The five-way domestic spat that is the Thousand Oaks City Council seems willing, sort of, to give it a try.

And none too soon. Until its members take serious steps to get their personal feuds under control, the council cannot give Thousand Oaks the leadership it deserves.

The year of bickering and back-stabbing that climaxed with last month’s failed recall of Elois Zeanah has transformed the board into a volatile mass of animosity, hurt feelings, suspicion and vengeance.

At last week’s meeting all five members tried heroically to get along, producing a string of 5-0 votes amid the forced politeness of Thanksgiving dinner with hostile in-laws. In the process, they demonstrated just how tough the healing process is going to be.

Right after the election, we called for someone to show some leadership and pull things together. Andy Fox, Mayor Judy Lazar and Zeanah herself responded with proposals--all of which were belittled by other council members as self-serving or insincere.

The easiest target was Fox’s call for a team-building retreat, with professional facilitator, to help the council members resolve their personality clashes and communication gaps. Dr. Laura, where are you?

But such a session sounds like precisely what this bunch needs. That argument was made most eloquently by Mike Markey, the council’s resident cop and not exactly Mr. Touchy-Feely.

“We need to deal with these interpersonal issues, and we all have them,” he said as the debate drifted toward midnight. “We need to take off our coats, sit down over coffee and be more candid than we can be on TV.”

Markey kept pulling the focus back to this crucial point as Fox and Zeanah called--separately, competitively--for thoroughly compatible exercises in envisioning the city’s future. Zeanah declared Fox’s proposal for a community-wide Vision 2010 effort unnecessary, since Thousand Oaks did something similar in 1994. Then she proposed her own very similar exercise, using computer modeling to picture how the city will look and sound in 2020.

And that non-conflict shows the real problem here: The council members are so obsessed with exposing each other’s flaws and hidden agendas, they wind up disagreeing even when they agree.

We sympathize with the popular notion that if you aren’t paranoid these days, it means you aren’t paying attention. But in this case it seems as if a lot of progress could be made if the five council members didn’t try quite so vigorously to find fault with each other.

There are some real, legitimate roadblocks here. Zeanah, having survived the recall, deserves a word of congratulations from her contentious colleagues and an apology for remarks about her that often have fallen short of decorum and professionalism. Likewise, the other members have endured plenty of abuse and intentional misrepresentation from Zeanah and some of her zealous supporters. They, too, deserve apologies.

And at the very least, the people of Thousand Oaks deserve civility if not respect, good manners if not trust, from their elected leaders.

So we welcome the council’s tentative agreement to hold a session in which confronting these issues is the one and only item on the agenda. Resolving them may be an impossible task; team-building exercises in other cities have been known to end in screaming matches and hasty exits. But there is nothing more important that this group could accomplish, and the sooner the better.

“I want a change,” Markey declared. “I’m going to fight for it. I want to hear five people say that.”

So do we.

In this case it seems as if a lot of progress could be made if the five council members didn’t try quite so vigorously to find fault with each other.