City Council Preview - Feb 2

Tuesday night there are a number of items on the agenda.

PICKING A NEW PLANNING COMMISSIONER

There are 3 applicants for the position

· Kyle Carroll has lived in the City for 4 years but not been very active in any City committees or events. He wants to “actively engage in the growth, expansion, revitalization and oversight of Lake Forest planning.” He has a law degree from Chapman with an emphasis on “Environmental, Land Use, and Real Estate.”

· Col. Tom Cagley should be well known to everyone. He ran for Council last year and was beaten by a small margin by Andy Hamilton. Col. Cagley is a founding member of the Marine Support Committee and attends almost every Council meeting. He was on the Grand Jury in 2014. He had extensive planning experience working for the Army and also as a Consultant to the Texas Dept. of Emergency Management. He wants to “provide guidance for the ever increasing viability of our city as it matures and develops over the next decade.”

· Mark Armando currently serves on the Traffic Advisory Group and on the Board of his HOA. He is a Police Officer and his goal is “to maintain the beauty of Lake Forest…” and ”…make sure all development in the City fits in with this model.”

CITY OF KINDNESS

How kind is it to –

• · Make your citizens stand out in the cold and rain while their opponents are allowed to roam free inside Council chambers.
• · Falsely accuse a colleague of “targeting” someone’s children
• · Illegally send out flyers calling a Councilman “Nuts”?
• · Make fun of residents when they make public comments?
• · Cut residents off in mid-sentence when they are speaking?
• · Vote to prematurely stop all attempts to find an alternative to the OC shelter which provides bad service, inhumane care, and kills nearly 40% of the animals who enter?
• · Refuse to create a NON-PROFIT Community Foundation and an Animal Welfare Commission?
• · Refuse to allow “Meals on Wheels” to use vacant Council room to provide services to nearly 100 Lake Forest seniors?

Should we be talking about a “City of Kindness”? It’s not the first adjective that comes to mind if you look at what’s been happening in the City.

TAX EXEMPT BONDS

The Portola center plans to build 930 units and among these will be 57 “on site affordable senior housing units” designed for seniors with “very low income”. How great is that! The last 4 projects approved by the Council avoided building affordable units which was a terrible loss to the City, and in addition, may ultimately result in the City losing millions of dollars. So it’s really good to see affordable homes being built on site. The company building them Chelsea proposes to finance the project, in part, with tax exempt bonds, and for this to happen, the Council must sign off on the process.

ANIMAL CARE SERVICES

OC Animal Care (OCAC) has been putting out false data about the euthanasia rate and about the license compliance rate. I exposed these deficiencies in a recent article, and after denying the facts and disparaging me, OCAC finally admitted their transgressions and corrected the errors. Because of the number and seriousness of the errors, I asked the staff to investigate their billing accuracy.

According to staff, when examining their billing and comparing it to their database, it looks like OCAC is making errors, but they minor (less than 1%) and in our favor.

In addition to looking at their billing, the Council will consider the highly secretive FOAB (Finance Operations Advisory Board). Here is a group of individuals who generate policy recommendations that impact everything that happens at the OC Shelter, yet no one can attend their meetings and there are no minutes to see what they are doing. Although our staff report says that “Staff provides updates to the City Council on certain topics discussed at the FOAB meetings as appropriate” I personally never recall this happening in the past 8 years.

I don’t want to spend too much time talking about OCAC. I will submit a plan tonight in which I believe our City can move away from OCAC and I sincerely hope we will, and then what OCAC does or doesn’t do won’t impact our City anymore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest. 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. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 4 pm to 6 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a Town Hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be on Jan 30 at 2 pm at the Foothill Ranch Public Library