The City Council meeting this week promises to be interesting. It’s the first meeting since the recall supporters turned in more than 8,100 signed petitions to oust The Gang of 3. I hope the recall people are on board with my call for Voigts and Hamilton to resign, sparing the City the costs of the special election. Click Here for more details on that compromise. Many recall supporters want all 3 gone and don’t like the idea that Robinson will escape justice, as they see it. I’m anxious to see if the recall supporters will go along and settle for just 2, sparing the City an estimated $180K to $220K and months of turmoil.
This is “National Public Works Week” according to the agenda and I’m not sure we should be celebrating so heavily. Remember the Saddleback Ranch Rd fiasco? Or when they re-built Tamarisk Park and forgot the disabled access?
This is also “Municipal Clerk’s Week” and for that we do have a lot to celebrate. Our Clerk’s office is one of the best functioning departments in the City, and the fact that they’ve continued doing an excellent job while handling the added work load (and stresses) of the recall and testament to their competence.
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On the Consent Calendar are a bunch of items –
SLURRY SEAL
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$477,272 to Doug Martin Contracting to slurry seal streets in the southwest corner of the City bounded by Toledo Way, Ridge Route Dr, Muirlands Blvd and Bake Pkwy. Doug Martin was the low bidder and got good reviews from previous work sites.
CIVIC CENTER TECHNOLOGY
The design of the Civic Center’s technology infrastructure will be critical to the functionality, flexibility, and usability of the new Lake Forest Civic Center. This infrastructure includes physical infrastructure, hardware, communications systems, security systems, and audio-visual systems. The staff recommends awarding a 3 year contract for $348,500 to P2S Engineering (Brea) to help with design, bid, and project management. P2S received the highest scores but was the second highest bidder and on a cost per hour was the highest bidder. The original amount proposed by P2S was $435,900 but staff got them down to $348,500.
TRAFFIC SIGNAL MAINTENANCE
The City proposes to extend the contract to CSC for traffic signal maintenance services. In their review, the staff says that they satisfied or very satisfied with “performance”, “timeliness”, “budget”, and “customer service”. What they don’t tell us, however, and to me this is the most important item, is how often the traffic signals went down and when this happened, how long they were down for.
I don’t drive a lot, but most of it is here in Lake Forest, and when I am driving it seems that a month doesn’t go by when I don’t see traffic lights malfunctioning. Now maybe that’s not a lot of outage, but then again I don’t do that much driving. But instead of saying they’re satisfied with “timeliness” we should be getting the range and average for outages.
CLOSED SESSION EVALUATION
The only Discussion Item is my request (supported by Councilman Nick) to ask our colleagues for a closed session evaluation of the City Manager (CM) and the City Attorney (CA). For those of you who don’t know, the Council hires the CM and the CA and that’s our only personnel decision. Because they can be considered our employees, we have to be careful about how we speak of their performance in public. That seems strange to me, but I have been assured by a gaggle of attorneys that I can’t shoot my mouth off without negative consequences due to this employer-employee relationship. It makes me yearn for the days when I was a citizen and free to say whatever I wanted, but such is the reality I am faced with.
As I indicated a few weeks ago I am gravely disappointed in how well the City met the challenges of the recent recall effort, along with the recent Saddleback Ranch Rd. fiasco. I wanted to be able to discuss the City’s performance in these and related matters, and the only way to do so is to tie it into a performance evaluation of the CM and the CA. What I’m looking to achieve here is to review what happened and see how we might have responded better, so that in the future, we won’t be subject to the problems we encountered. This is not intended to embarrass the CM or the CA, but it is intended to say that I’m disappointed in many aspects of our service and I want us to discuss how we can do better in the future.
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 August 13 at 2 pm at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.
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