Elections are said to be about the future, not the past. But reelections can often take a detour to the not so distant past, where candidates have a record that they can run on oron which a challenger can cited as a reason why voters should reject the incumbent.
For Mayor Jeffery Cooper, his views on the future intersect at times with things that he has learned during his first four years on the city council. And his time on one of Culver City’s commissions, his involvement with the Culver City Dog Park and a series of lessons that steered him away from one manner of thinking to another are serving as the building blocks in his bid for a second term on Culver City’s governing body.
“I wasn’t very political growing up,” Cooper, who lost his first race for council in 2008, began on a recent weekend before joined a group supporters to canvass neighborhoods. The mayor, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970s, a hotbed of political activism in that decade, eschewed politics largely until he was an adult.
Appointed to the Culver City Parks, Recreation and Community Services Dept. in the late 1990s, Cooper cut his teeth on Culver City politics by volunteering on campaigns for former Culver City Councilman Alan Corlin and former councilwoman Carol Gross.
On the commission, Cooper said he learned the value of cooperation and collaboration. “[Being on a commission] teaches you to work with a group, and I think it’s helped me to do the same on the City Council,” he said. “I think it gave me a better understanding of the dynamics of working with city government.”
He said some of early lessons on a city commission have helped him on the city council as well, par ticularly about tak- ing a broader view of things instead of always having a short-sighted, provincial outlook. Serving on the Westside Cities Council of Government has also accelerated his political growth, Cooper added.
“I’ve always wanted to be sort of ‘Culver-City’ centric,” the mayor explained. “But I’ve learned to broaden my geographical views because we’re surrounded by other cities that we have to work with on regional issues, so I’ve learned that you have to look at things much broader. “You have to get out of that way of thinking because there are so many issues that tie us all together.”
One of Cooper’s early ventures where he worked with a group was his role in helping to create a local landmark with help from the city government is the Culver City Dog Park. The mayor calls working on the project “one of my initial entrees’” into local politics.
“A friend of mine had this crazy idea about starting a dog park,” said Cooper, who was on the parks and recreation commission at the time. “I had the opportunity to get to know how the city works and to meet a lot of good people who wanted to have a dog park in Culver City.”
Vicki Daly Redholtz workedwith Cooper on the dog park, which has grown in popularity since it opened in 2006. Daly Redholtz, the chair of the Cul- ver City Dog Park, said Cooper was one of the early driving forces behind its creation.
“I was walking with my dog one days and I met some peo- ple who told me about this guy who had this idea of starting a local dog park,” Daly Redholtz, who is working on Cooper’s reelection campaign, recalled. “Í didn’t know Jeff but I called him. A group of about six of us starting working on the dog park and Jeff was very helpful with putting in touch with the right people at City Hall.”
Cooper cites completing Parcel B, a years long downtown mixed use development, as a council priority, as well as a transit-oriented development near the Exposition Line station that he hopes will bring in sales tax and business tax revenue to the city’s coffers.
On affordable housing, Cooper said the city is “getting much better” and noted the 33 af fordable units created at the mixed-use Tilden Terrace development, Culver City’s first affordable housing project in 15 years.
While Cooper and other members of the present council take credit for the creation of the low-to- moderate income apartments, planning records indicate that the since disbanded Culver City Redevelopment Agency acquired two properties near Washington Boulevard and Washington Place where Tilden Terrace is located in 2006 and 2008, two years before the mayor was elected to the City Council.
“Getting better” may be in the eye of the beholder. In a 2010 study, the News reported the state Of fice of Oversight and Outcomes found that the Culver City Redevelopment Agency’s low to moderate income housing fund took in nearly $5 million in property tax money, the highest of any of the 12 agencies selected at random and held a total of $22.1 million.
The group stated in its report- a review that Cooper dismissed from the dais shortly after the News published the findings and several residents question the council about at a council meeting that during a 13-year period, beginning in 1995 and ending in 2008, Culver City reported only four new units of affordable housing.
King rejected what he sees as the council’s and Cooper’s touting the 33 units as an accomplishment, while others cities have created far more units.
“That’s a good sound bite,” King said, “but what’s the truth behind it?” Santa Monica opened a 100-unit low, income-housing complex in December.
Cooper acknowledged that the city needs to do more andraise the question of why other councils had not created more housing.
“Why didn’t this happen in prior years?” he asked.
He now advocates working with developers to add more affordable housing to their projects in Culver City, possibly by using a state law, Senate Bill 1818. The law allows develop- ers to increase the density of a project if they agree to add more affordable housing units.
Westside communities near Culver City are in an intense debate about the controversial law, which opponents say allows developers to increase the size and ultimately the profits of a development, but does not often require them to build the affordable units at the project site or at all.
One Cooper supporter, Scott Zeidman, said the mayor is the real deal.
“I’ve lived here for 40 years and I can’t think of a better candidate that Jeff Cooper,” said Zeidman, a former member of the Culver City Unified School District Board of Education.
Rent control is another topic that appears to have gained traction in recent months. But Cooper, a mortgage banker at Wells Fargo, doesn’t see it that way.
“I don’t see it has as a large issue,” he said.
Cooper said he is opposed to rent control, but does think the topic merits a public conversa-tion. “Let’s have a frank discussion about it,” he said. “I see nothing wrong with that.”
On the controversial topic of hydraulic fracturing, Coopers opposes it, but has not joined very ardent opponents of the oil extraction procedure in advocating a local ban.
“My thinking is I don’t us to stick our necks out on our own, especially now that Los Angeles, a much bigger city, has already taken that step,” he explained.
There are homeowners who benefit from oil drilling in Culver City. They have mineral rights to the oil that flows underneath their homes and they stand to profit if oil drilling is allowed again in Culver City.
Cooper said he feels for those constituents as well, but he has to take a much broader view of the situation a municipal legislator. “I’m very concerned about them losing money, but I would tell them that the health and safety of the residents of the city trump monetary concerns,” he asserted.
Cooper cites what he says in the city’s current financial and social stability as reasons why he should be reelected.
“I’m ready to keep fighting for and protecting that,” he concluded. “If you look at how our city is run, I think you’ll see that all of us on the council take this job very seriously.”
Election day is April 8.