City Council Preview for Jan 6

Here are some interesting items to come up at the City Council meeting this week on Tuesday at 7 pm.

VILLAGE POND PARK

For more than a year the Council put off instituting an ordinance to prohibit feeding wildlife in Village Pond Park (VPP). Let’s see…

• · VPP has become unpleasant to people and unhealthy to wildlife because of all the feces and urine produced by the animal overpopulation.
• · The main cause of the overpopulation and the excess urine and feces is the massive feeding of the ducks and geese, particularly by people who bring large quantities (e.g., trunk loads) of bread.
• · There is no law against feeding the wildlife so the people do it with impunity (probably unaware that it is unhealthy for the animals).

To solve this problem, the Council spent $30,000 to conduct a survey of the residents, almost all of whom wanted the pond to stay intact and almost all of whom wanted the massive feeding of the wildlife to stop.

Then the City spent another $200,000+ to have a firm draw up plans for architecturally making changes to the park and the pond, none of which involve stopping the feeding of the wildlife.

On tap, the City plans to then spend $1,600,000 to implement these architectural changes, none of which involves stopping the people from feeding the wildlife?

Hmmm.

Are we missing something here?

Is it possible the problem of excessive urine and feces in VPP could be solved by an ordinance, a couple of hundred dollars in signs, and some strict enforcement for a few weeks?

Stay tuned. It’s your tax dollars at work.

TREE MANAGEMENT

The optimal time for trimming trees has long past, but the City still has no tree trimming contract in place. Click here for the dismal history involved.

The contracts are coming back to the Council on Tuesday night with the same recommendation that the staff made a month ago. From what I can see, the bid amounts are virtually the same as they were 2 months ago, so it’s hard to understand what happened in the month plus since the Council deferred voting (FWIW I was the only one who voted against postponing the decision). Once more the staff are recommending to give the contract to the low bidder ($259,995 vs. $581,135).

It may interest you to know that the City has 14,000 trees and the average unit cost for pruning trees is $50+. Neighboring cities get the job done for about the same unit cost, with ranges from $48 (Newport Beach) to $70 (Laguna Beach).

SELECTION PROCESS

In a few weeks the Council will be appointing people to fill the expired Commission openings (4 Planning and 3 Parks and Recreation). All 3 Planning Commissioners have asked to be reappointed and 2 of the 3 PRC have done likewise. Click here for the names of the people applying.

Tomorrow we’ll look at one more item.

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.

PS

This Tuesday I start my office hours at City Hall. I will be available from 2 pm to 5 pm. Stop by, ask a question, make a complaint, or just say “hi”.