City Council Preview - Will the "Workshop" Work?

Along with others, I have been complaining about the way we get things done in the City, or perhaps more appropriately, the way we don’t get things done. There are so many items being passed over and left in the “in box” that I began calling it the “Void” and over the years it has remained at a dozen or so items that remain unaddressed. The last time I wrote about this was a few weeks ago and everything I said then remains true. None of those items has been dealt with since then, but we nonetheless made time for some fresh items, including the ludicrous suggestion from the Mayor to talk about “The Kindness City”. Not that there is anything wrong with kindness. In fact, kindness is great. But in a City where the laws seem to be for a select few, and where residents are forced to stand in the cold and dark while elected officials are allowed to roam freely, both doing the same thing, one has to wonder if “kindness” is the most appropriate thing to be talking about. When the man who ordered people to stop clapping, stop laughing, and even stop talking, now wants to paint the City with the brush of “kindness” I find myself picking up that classic book “1984”.

In any event, the City scheduled a “workshop” (which looks like just another meeting to me) to discuss “City Council Policy”, as if the problems are somehow contained in policies and not in people and process. The policies that have been selected include –

· Written Communication

· Consensus

· Public Comment

· Leadership

Consensus

For many years the City required 3 members to place an item on the agenda. In 2012 they changed it to 2 and in 2015 it was changed back to 3. When it was changed from 2 to 3 we specifically asked that staff present a report on the impact of doing this, but that report never surfaced. Thus we can’t say for certain that the change has stifled debate and prevented items from coming onto the agenda. Of course, in our City at the present time, three of the Council members vote in lock step almost all the time. So it doesn’t really matter whether they vote in lock step to prevent something from coming on the agenda in the first place, or they wait until it comes on the agenda and then vote in lock step to defeat it. The problem, as Hamlet lamented, is not in the stars but in ourselves. The problem is not whether 2 or 3 people should be allowed to get an item on the agenda, the problem is that we have a Council where 3 people vote in lock step. On several occasions they are so bold as to ask for the vote before we’ve even had a chance to take a breath after the issue is mentioned, much less discussed. Click Here for an educational article about this issue.

Public Comment

2015 was a disastrous. People who came before the podium to make public comments were verbally abused, interrupted, and cut off in mid-sentence. When the public comment sessions went against the grain for the Gang of 3 it was cut short. When it went in favor of their positions, something that happened rarely but did in fact happen, it was allowed to go beyond the 30 minute time limit.

There’s nothing wrong with the policy as it appears, only how it is implemented.

Leadership Principles

The Leadership Principles are a joke, violated at will by City Council members who call their colleagues “moron”, “imbecile”, “liar”, vengance seeker”, “panderer”, “thief”, etc. There is nothing in the “Leadership Principles” that has any force and no penalty for violating the principles, although in the current milieu, I doubt there is anything that any of the ruling party to could that would encourage one of them to turn on any of the others.

Let’s look at item 1.5 in the principles –

“Refrain from abusive conduct, personal charges, or verbal attacks upon the character, motives, ethics, morals, or comments of other Members of the Council, commissions, committees, staff, or the public.”

Andy Hamilton had the chance to do the right thing when he was asked to censure his BFF Dwight Robinson for calling a fellow Council member a “moron”, “imbecile” “liar” etc. etc. Surely calling a colleague “moron” or “imbecile” qualifies as “abusive conduct” or “verbal attacks upon the character, motives, ethics, morals, or comments of other Members of the Council…” yet Hamilton refused to vote the censure.

OTOH, Dwight Robinson accused Adam Nick of making a racial slur, and the two people to whom Robinson claimed Nick made the slur, denied that it happened, but this didn’t stop Robinson, Hamilton, and Voigts from censuring Nick.

Or consider this little gem -

“Safeguard ability to make independent, objective, fair and impartial judgements by scrupulously avoiding financial and social relationships and transactions that may compromise, or give the appearance of compromising, objectivity, independence, and honesty.”

Is there anyone in their right mind who doesn’t think that getting more than $100,000 from developers and from companies doing business with the City, and voting to give all of them whatever they want, does at least give “the appearance of compromising, objectivity, independence, and honesty.” It’s not illegal to take the money, but doesn’t it give “the appearance”. Of course my colleagues claim it doesn’t, and in a world where 3 out of 5 is how the decisions are made, it does not give the appearance.

This is the world we live in and no changes to the “Leadership” principles are going to make a difference.

What We Might Discuss

Now here are some topics that might be worth considering –

· Follow Through – Is the Council getting back everything it instructs the staff to do? If not, what can be done?

· Follow Up – Is the Council getting items back in a timely manner? If not, what can be done?

· Information – Do the staff have the relevant information available to them when they are asked questions from the Council on items that are on the agenda? If not, what can be done?

· Quality – Are our reports of such high quality that Council are able to make informed decisions without postponements? If not, what can be done?

· Timing – Are our meetings uniformly of an optimal length so that we don’t suffer late into the night and risk decisions which ought not to have been made? If not, what can be done?

· Sequencing – Do we have a global view of what needs to happen, or are we just making piece meal decisions? If we are, how can we change?

If I were looking for organizational gold, I would go panning among these issues and not wading through a bunch of policies that probably have little bearing on how well we are doing our jobs.

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 March 26 at 2 pm at the Foothill Ranch Public Library

0”,“0xCw*