City Council at 100 Days - Part 2

We’re doing an assessment of the “First 100 Days” for the new City Council. Last Time (Click Here) we summarized the first 100 days last year to give us a baseline against which to evaluate the Council’s performance this year. To summarize briefly, last year we

• Established more than three dozen new and effective ways to better communicate, to improve our quality of life, and to make government work better.
• Most of these innovations continue to this date.

Here in 2019 the new Council has initiated not a single new project.

What is more disturbing than the fact that the new Council has initiated nothing new, is how little they achieved with the projects that were already in motion. Let’s go through some examples -

Civic Center

This enormous project was on time and on budget and scheduled to be fully open by the start of the Summer. But the City had to push back the opening to the Fall. Not a big deal, but disappointing.

In addition, we will have a great performing arts center that could serve the community and earn the City millions of new dollars in rental fees. But the rental business is a future business, and people are usually booking events 6 to 18 months in advance. In order to have the center fully booked, the City needed to start working on this, but the City put this off. They don’t intend to do anything in this area until the Summer, which means we will probably miss a half years’ worth of revenue. This is a serious omission and it means losing hundreds of thousands of dollars of new revenue.

Mobile Apps

In 2017 we introduced the “Shop and Dine” mobile app and in 2018 we introduced a broader city-wide mobile app. Mobile apps need to be expanded, updated, and continually improved. To date there is no real progress in both of these apps. That’s not the end of the world, but it means we are being less responsive to people’s needs.

(A skeptic would say that responding to people’s needs is not what this Council was paid to do. The “Do Nothing” Gang was placed there with hundreds of thousands of dollars from special interests, like developers, companies seeking city contracts, and the Police Union. Less than 5% of the $500,000 that poured into electing these people actually came from residents. So why would this Council care about improving communication with residents?)

Online Neighborhood Watch

Last year we were on the brink of establishing a rebate program for people who purchased Ring Doorbell video systems. The project finally was launched on February 28, two months later. Well, better late than never.

We were also promoting the “Online Neighborhood Watch” program. It was anticipated to be in place before the end of 2018 and it was to be integrated with OCSD so that we would have a great advantage in preventing crime or identifying it very early. To date there has been no progress.

Street Sweeping

One of the initiatives we instituted in 2018 was a cooperative agreement with Mission Viejo to share a street sweeping company and thus lower the costs to both cities.

The issue came to the new Council in February and for some unknown reason the project was put off until mid-2020, at the earliest. The only explanation from staff was that it would require “some work”, as if their current salaries were not attractive enough to warrant “some work”. According to Transparent California, here are the 2017 “total pay and benefits” for the employees involved in making this project happen –

• Debra Rose – City Manager - $273,036
• Keith Neves –Asst. City Manager - $254,421
• Tom Wheeler – Director of Public Works - $234,817
• Dave Rogers – Traffic Engineering Manager - $180,683

To me these seem like reasonable salaries to expect the people who receive them to do “some work”.

Fee Schedule

Most of the fees charged by the City were set 10 years ago and by now they are woefully outdated. The Council asked for a study of the fee schedules so that our fees would be more in line with current prices. This new schedule was important as we opened the new Civic Center and expanded our programs and services.

Raising fees is not something to be done lightly and to have them in place before the opening of the new Civic Center required that the study be done, analyzed, opened up to the public for a healthy debate. Then a new fee schedule can be proposed, reviewed, and implemented. It's a long process and should have already been started. Yet the Council has yet to consider the vast issues.

Summary

We looked at five issues today. I purposefully selected projects for which there were no underlying special interests trying to influence the outcomes. All of these projects were well underway last year and should have already been brought to fruition or at least progressed. In most cases we've seen no progress. Here's the list

• We are still on budget for the Civic Center
• We did manage to get the Ring rebate established, even though it was two months late (better late than never).
• The much needed fee schedule study has yet to emerge, meaning we will probably not meet the desired goal to thoroughly evaluate this program prior to opening the Civic Center. That means we will be losing potential revenue as the costs of providing user based services exceed the prices being charged.
• Our street sweeping program that could save us $100K a year has been pushed back for more than a year
• The opening of the Civic Center has been delayed from Summer to Fall. This will mean more than $1 million in extra costs.
• The much needed Performing Arts Director position has yet to be filled, meaning we miss out on hundreds of thousands of new income.
• After a very promising start, our two mobile apps have languished

Tomorrow we’ll focus on what the “Do Nothing Gang” isn’t doing in regard to projects that impact the Police Department. Police Unions spent over $100,000 in recent years to influence elections in Lake Forest. Money flowed to elect Tettemer, Moatazedi, Robinson, and to try desperately to keep Hamilton from being thrown out. Outside of the developers, the Unions have been the most aggressive trying to control the City Council. Let's see how efficient this Council is in making progress in an area where they owe a debt to the people who put them there.

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