City Council Meeting Erupts at Weekly Seal Beach Brawl

What a letdown.

It was like thinking you’d bought a ticket to a cage match of the World Wrestling Federation and winding up instead at a bake sale.

Where’s the refund counter?

The Seal Beach City Council has made quite a name for itself over the months, with its meetings frequently resembling some kind of mutant hybrid of CNN’s “Crossfire” and “The Simpsons.”

Name-calling, jeering, innuendoes, outright accusations . . . and that’s just the council. You ought to hear what the members of the audience say.

On most city councils, members ask each other, “What’s your pleasure?”

In Seal Beach, it’s “knives or pistols?” When they ask, “Is there a second?” it has nothing to do with advancing a motion.

Things got so bad (or good, depending on how you define entertainment) that last month Mayor Edna Wilson proposed an automatic one-minute recess if someone slurred someone else.

We can only assume that the next step will be to make members put their heads down on their desks and not let them play on the swings.

Anyway, the mayor said the council chambers shouldn’t be used to “unfairly defame or vilify” another. Later that night, member Marilyn Bruce Hastings accused member Joe Hunt of slurring her, but Hunt apologized before a timeout was invoked.

On another occasion, the council debated whether some members of the archeological committee had violated the law by leaving the committee meeting and going over to a Denny’s restaurant, where they discussed public business. The council has also debated whether to allow clapping at the meetings.

Not surprisingly, council meetings began running into the wee hours. One a.m. was not at all unusual for adjournment time, and other meetings have run as late as 3, 4 and 5 a.m.

So, I toddled on over to the council chambers Monday night, looking for some action.

I was prepared to stick it out to the bitter end and make careful note of the outrageous conduct.

Talk about disappointed.

The meeting lasted a mere 3 hours, 45 minutes. Not a single timeout for a slur was called, although Hunt referred to one proposal from his colleagues as “a scam and a fraud. . . . This doesn’t just have an aroma to it; it stinks.”

I thought that warranted a cooling-off period, but no one suggested it.

Maybe the problem was that with Wilson gone, Hunt was alone against the three-member council majority. He did a pretty good job of holding his own and, from where I sat, it looked as if he kind of enjoys the oral fisticuffs.

Much of the enmity on the council stems from a longstanding dispute over a proposed project of the Mola Development Corp. The company is either ruining Seal Beach or helping it march into the future, depending on which side you believe.

Hunt and Wilson support the development, with members Gwen Forsythe, Frank Laszlo and Hastings opposing it.

The development is being put to a vote of the people in June, and the council has apparently agreed to try to restrain itself until at least after the election.

But the issue managed to surface again Monday, this time over the question of whether the city should pay the legal fees of the council majority, which was sued (right along with the other side) over proposed ballot language.

Hunt wanted to know why the three-member majority should get its legal fees paid by the city while he, on the other side of the issue, did not. Laszlo told Hunt not to worry, that Mola would pay his legal fees.

That was about as nasty as it got, which wasn’t really very nasty. Oh, a citizen attacked the city’s development office for being in league with developers, which prompted Hunt to call the attack “an entirely indecent thing to do.”

That qualified as old news and didn’t merit a timeout either, so that whole idea must be dead in the water.

After stepping out into the cool night air as 11 p.m. approached, I wondered how people can sit through those meetings, especially the poor city officials who are probably required to watch them on cable TV.

I also wonder whether the council has considered the implications of acting like mature citizens in the future.

As any rassling fan will tell you, that’s the surest way to lose your audience.