City Council at 100 days - Part 1

The first time I heard about “100 days” was about 50 years ago when John Kennedy finished his first 100 days in office. But according to Wikipedia the tradition dates back to Franklin Roosevelt in a radio address in 1933 (Click Here) and has been used many times since then.

So let’s take a look at the first 100 days of the new City Council. To do that appropriately we need to first take a look at what was done last year in the first 100 days. That will give us a good baseline to evaluate how the current Council is doing. Following that we’ll look at the first 100 days in 2019.

I’m not going to list everything that was done last year, but will rather focus on the major issues.

BEING MORE RESPONSIVE TO RESIDENTS

• Allowing people to participate in council meetings online using FacebookLive - we were the first City in the US to do this.
• Extending the FacebookLive model to major meetings.
• Improving city council meetings by (a) creating a slide show about the city and upcoming city events, to educate people while they wait for the council meetings to begin (b) creating a “greeter” for council meetings to welcome people and orient them to the meeting, and (c) creating “take away” flyers at council meetings to keep people in touch with upcoming events.

IMPROVING OUR QUALITY OF LIFE

• Creating a Traffic and Parking Commission (it started in August)
• Offering a new seminar on child exploitation and internet safety that was well attended.

COMMUNICATING BETTER WITH PEOPLE

• Creating a weekly “Mayor’s Minute” to better inform people (we did 40 episodes and it continues to this date).
• Creating a Business Executive Roundtable where the city and business leaders can sit down together, exchange information, and plan for the future (it met 3 times last year).
• Creating an HOA Roundtable where the city and HOA leaders can sit down together, exchange information, and plan for the future (it met 3 times last year).
• Creating a “Pop-up City Hall” where staff and Council members are available at community events (we did 4 of these last year).

MAKING GOVERNMENT WORK BETTER

• Placing real term limits on the November ballot (it won by 80%+)
• When addressing complex issues, we decided that City Council members will form ad hoc committees and report back, in writing, to the Council (We did this for (a) Relations with Saddleback Valley Unified School District, (b) Business Development, (c) Ethics, (d) Street sweeping, and (e) Homelessness.
• Increasing accountability by (a) requiring the City Manager to report in writing on a quarterly basis an update on all major projects underway, (b) requiring City Council members and designees who are part of County and State-wide committees to report in writing on a quarterly basis, and (c) requiring the City Attorney to produce a weekly summary of all legal issues facing the City.

Most of these innovations continue to this date.

So that’s what we did last year in the first 100 days in addition to doing the normal things that City Councils do (e.g., appointing Commission members, scheduling budget hearings, approving contracts, etc.). Next time we’ll see what happened in the first 100 days for this new Council.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner was on the Lake Forest City Council from 2014 to 2018 and Mayor in 2018. Under his leadership the City became the first debt free city in the U.S. with a population over 25,000 people and the first city to live broadcast City Council meetings that allowed residents to participate online (Click Here). Dr. Gardner is one of the organizing members of Lake Forest Community Action Network. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook