We got no joy last week watching Dave Golonski suffer a crushing 4-1 defeat over his ficus tree proposal. We’ve mentioned before here that Golonski is totally correct about wanting to save those pretty trees, and that the idea of cutting them down en masse is a travesty.
For those who don’t know, both Burbank and Glendale have a thing up their craw about any kind of showy, leafy big tree. Glendale’s been worse, with their policy of engaging in sudden weekend destruction fests in their older neighborhoods, with one result being that they’ve eliminated all of their stately old carob trees, among others.
Burbank seems bound and determined to do a catch-up job when it comes to their own “re-forestation” program, a term that Golonski correctly pointed out should be called “de-forestation” instead. What Golonski wanted to do last week was revisit the planned destruction of 300 of these ficus trees on Magnolia, but in the end, as always on this proposal, he was outvoted by the rest of the council.
In order to get these councils to go along with them, our local agencies lie through their teeth when they claim these showy trees are inherently hazardous. The real story behind their removal is that these management people can save themselves a lot of grief when they cut them all down, because big old trees are expensive to maintain. Some of the local merchants are their own worst enemies down there, too, because they think cutting down the trees will help people better notice their signs.
To defend his position, Golonski pointed out that Portos Bakery had made a great asset of their own shady ficus trees, and that cutting those down would make outdoor seating impossible in the heat. He also demolished the city’s phony contention that these ficus trees are destroying sidewalks all over the place, and that’s why they need to be removed.
Clearly, Magnolia’s ficus grove is a beautiful sight when you drive into town, and an asset to the area. Only an idiot would seek to get rid of all of them.
So why did Golonski lose on his meritorious position?
Much could be made here that Burbank is run by an ignorant, lamebrain class of clowns, and that the kind of people who care about things like beautiful trees prefer to live in more affluent places like South Pasadena or Los Gatos, two communities that value their trees more than their kids. We’ve cited this explanation before, and it’s still a good one.
But Golonski has been in power since the early 90s, and that’s given him plenty of time to have built a progressive constituency that, with a moment’s notice, would have been down at the council chambers in full force and all screaming to the high heavens about this stupidly conceived destruction.
Though he’s had that opportunity for years, Golonski has consistently failed to take advantage of it. What we’ve gotten instead from him has been years’ worth of snarkiness and ego. For lord’s sake, even the famously grouchy Ted McConkey was able to build up a public following that would always respond to his particular political concerns, whatever you thought of them, and Ted was considered to be a major antagonizer in town.
If Golonski had played his cards right, he could have helped create a huge and focused concern about preservationist issues like tree removal, or old houses, or whatever he wanted. He could have been talking about this kind of thing all the time during council meetings, or written op-ed pieces in the newspaper, which would have published them for sure.
He could have also made an effort to join in with people like Ted McConkey early on about these issues, or Bob Kramer, or Marsha Ramos, and sublimated his vanity a bit in order to do so. Or he could have used the dais as a regular bully pulpit every week or two, constantly reminding people about the importance of keeping things nice around here. At least the staff would have gotten the message.
But Golonski never did, and he never will. So that’s why when these concerns come up it’s like they are coming from Mars.
Here’s an apocryphal story that describes what we mean about Golonski’s disinclination to ever do anything really constructive. Last year we went to the library management and tried to get them to subscribe to a periodical database called JSTOR. We even wrote about it, here.
JSTOR is an academic research site that is subsidized by the Mellon Foundation back East. What they do is scan thousands of old magazines and journals and then make them available free to their online subscribers. The cost of subscribing to this database is negligible, really, certainly much less than the inferior for-profit corporate databases that our library system seems to prefer.
The total cost per year for Burbank to subscribe to JSTOR? How about $750. There’s a three-year initiation fee of $1,000, too, and then that’s it. It would be a real coup for Burbank to have this resource, too.
So when we first proposed this idea, Golonski seemed enthusiastic about it. He even forwarded an e-mail where he asked the head librarian to look into the idea and get back to him.
But when the librarian responded negatively, and claimed (dishonestly) that this was a large sum of money that they couldn’t afford– but then wouldn’t divulge the cost of their current commercial periodical database– Golonski lost interest. He wouldn’t pursue it. He never followed it up. He didn’t do anything, despite the fact that he got a bunch of bum information from his people that was incredibly easy to refute. And don’t forget, he was the one who was interested in this in the first place!
We learned two things from this quick exploration into city ineptitude. The first is that Burbank is a stupid, shortsighted town that’s being run by total numbskulls who lie all the time. The second is that Dave Golonski– the educated, thoughtful guy who should really be the one to know and care about this kind of stuff– is positively useless.