City Council Preview for May 19

This week at the City Council we’ll be discussing the following items –

CITY MANAGER PERFORMANCE

This subject comes up in Closed Session as required by law. But feel free to comment on the City Manager at our Facebook Page. Click Here.

PARKING PERMITS

Once again we have residents of a neighborhood who are complaining about the overflow from a multi-unit apartment development overcrowding their streets. This comes up every year, and the practice of the City is to do some investigation and then recommend issuing permits that restrict parking on City streets in that area to people who have a permit (meaning the residents who do not live in the apartments).

This weeks’ application is for the streets along Oswego near the Eaves Apartments on Muirlands and Lake Forest Drive. The Eaves has 220 living units and 364 parking spaces, which given the realities of today, means they are probably short of onsite parking spaces. The City street adjacent to the Eaves is quite long and accommodates dozens of more cars on both sides of the street, and brings the total number of spaces for Eaves to over 400, but according to the City, residents of the Eaves still overflow into the adjacent streets (Avalon, Nolan, Larkin).

It looks like a no-brainer, except that in the past year I heard complaints by residents of the apartment units where parking permits have been instituted, that the residents of the homes are using their garages for storage space and leaving their driveways free, and taking advantage of the extra street parking as a result of the permits. They suggested that before we issue permits, we ask the people requesting the permits to demonstrate that their garages and driveways are being used, and that the additional street parking that comes with a permit is not being abused. After all, no City resident has a stronger right to use a City street than any other resident.

CITY WEBSITE

I have been asking the City for some time to change from a staff-centric website to a resident-centric website, and part of this re-orientation is to use the Calendar section for a list of community-wide events, rather than merely City events. Tuesday night the staff will propose that we open up the Calendar section of the website to a variety of groups so that we reflect what’s going on in the City.

GRAFITTI

According to Police Services we get between 750 and 800 calls for graffiti each year, for which we pay about $148,000 per year. The incidence shows no signs of reduction despite the use of a software program designed to assist Police in tracking the usage. Staff wishes to extend the contract one year.

I’ve yet to see a report that discusses what efforts we’re taking to reduce the incidence of grafitti or what successes we have in identifying the abusers and what penalties they have been assessed. Of course this is not the company’s responsibility, but rather a report the Police should provide.

I have been told on several occasions that the swiftness with which we eliminate the graffiti is very good, but rising costs and no apparent handle on the problem is worrisome, especially when you consider the Police have just raised our budget by more than $1,000,000 per year.

Next time I’ll discuss the Street Sweeping contract.

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 3 pm to 5 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a mini town meeting every other month. The next meeting will be on May 16 at 2 pm at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.