City Council Preview for Feb 5 2019 - Part 2

The next Council meeting is tonight. It starts at 6:30 and you can come by or watch and participate live using Facebook (Click Here).

Yesterday I discussed the new Council's achievements (Click Here). Today we look at the agenda.

Staff proposes to review the 2018 Resident Satisfaction Study as a prelude to discussing the Strategic Plan. That being said, in terms of the Strategic Plan, Staff recommends “a proposed streamlined process and schedule for updating the Strategic Plan. Staff recommends focusing current efforts on updating the financial projections, projects and programs as part of the budget adoption process.” Does anyone else see the irony here?

STRATEGIC PLANNING

Staff believes that the strategic planning process adopted last year was robust and comprehensive and recommends a “streamlined process” that basically focuses on “updating the financial projections, projects, and programs” and doing this concurrently with the budget workshops (May 14 and June 18) later this year.

FWIW - I see no reason to conduct Strategic Planning with this group of Council members. As was pointed out recently by a resident at a Council meeting, we don't exactly have "The A Team" on the dais. In fact it looks like we have the "Do Nothing" Team (Click Here). More specifically we have

• a member who doesn't have a high school diploma
• a member who got his job by marrying the boss' daughter
• a member who worked for 14 years without promotion for a utility company
• another utility company member

It's not exactly the people you want sitting down to decide how to spend $100,000,000.

RESIDENT SATISFACTION

Problems with the resident satisfaction survey have been pointed out many times in the past. The process goes like this – we find a firm that says things are great and we pay them time and time again to say how great things are. The firm makes a living doing this, and almost every city they analyze comes up with adjectives like “terrific”, “outstanding”, etc. In my review of their studies it was difficult to find a single city that got less than 90% in their overall satisfaction. Curiously enough, one of those cities was Beverly Hills.

That being said, ignoring the absolute numbers, the study has some value in a comparative sense. For example, when citizens were asked what should be changed, the rank order of items was –

• Limit growth and development
• Attract new restaurants and stores
• Reduce traffic congestion
• Improve public safety.

"Limit growth and development" was the #1 choice on the survey but 4 of the 5 Council members were put in office by proponents of increased growth and development, most notably developers. This year a developer proposal to turn Nakase Nursery into 800 homes will come before the Council. Will those 4 Council members do what the developers paid for them to do? or will they do what the people want them to do? Go ahead - make a guess.

"Reduce traffic congestion" used to be our #1 issue but last time it dropped to #3. Our collective concern with traffic congestion led to my creating the Traffic and Parking Commission and to changes to the parking permit process - all done last year. We need to continue. We also need to understand that increasing homes will work against reducing traffic. Each new home generates 8 to 10 vehicle trips per day in the City. Adding 800 new homes means as many as 8,000 new vehicle trips in the city and most of these will be at peak hour.

"Improve public safety" is interesting since from 2014 to 2018 Lake Forest had the lowest crime rates in the city’s history. When current Mayor Tettemer was last in office, nearly a decade ago, our crime rate was 30% higher and we had the worst crime rate among the OCSD cities. Improving public safety should have been a priority then. Now we have one of the lowest crime rates of any of our neighbors.

PARKING PERMIT

Over the years we revised the Parking Permit process several times. Problems with parking permits come from the procedures but they also come from the way the staff implements the policy, which leaves a lot to be desired as many people have found out.

The current proposed updates come from the 2018 Council request that the Traffic and Parking Commission take a look at various problem areas. Before the Council now is a change to the “third permit” policies. The key provision is

“The Traffic Engineering Manager may revoke a third permit issued to a dwelling unit upon a finding that the dwelling unit’s off-street parking is not being adequately used, the number of vehicles registered to the dwelling unit no longer exceed the dwelling unit’s off-street parking by three or more, and/or the exceptional or unusual circumstances that justified the issuance of a third permit no longer exist. All third permits, regardless of issuance date, shall be subject to revocation under this Policy.”

LOCAL BUSINESS PREFERENCE

In 2018 our Council advocated for a local business preference. Voigts and Robinson fought this for years, but with Tom Cagley and Leah Basile at my side, we prevailed in getting traction on this issue. This preference would give local businesses a 5% benefit on their bids, so, for example, a local company that bid $9,500 would get the job against a company from out of the area who bid $9,000. The rationale for doing this is that local businesses create local jobs and tax revenue. Many other cities do the same and the 5% figure is used by Fountain Valley and Costa Mesa.

The staff report is grossly incorrect when it says that ”The Chamber of Commerce has provided a letter to the City Council in opposition to the implementation of the local business preference policy (“Attachment 1”).” If you read the Chamber’s letter, the Chamber recommended “Not to move forward” and wanted the staff to do a better job defining the process and exploring the alternatives or parallel processes. The Chamber’s letter can in no way be interpreted as being “opposed”.

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. 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