City Council Review - Saddleback Ranch Rd

Last night’s City Council session finished just shy of 11:30 pm and there is a lot to report even if not much actually happened. Today I’ll talk about Saddleback Ranch Rd. (SRR) and I’ll try to focus on what we can learn from this fiasco.

At the conclusion of a 4+ hour marathon City Council session, we are not much closer to understanding what happened on SRR. How could the City design, approve, build, and then support the creation of a road that was obviously going to create traffic congestion and present a clear and present danger to pedestrians?

PLANNING COMMISSION

One key element is the Planning Commission (PC). I’ve written several times about the destruction of the integrity of the Planning Commission in 2014 right after Dwight Robinson joined the Council. Scott Voigts and Dwight Robinson have been on an unabashed mission to fill the Commission and Advisory groups with their friends, campaign contributors, and campaign workers. They appointed less qualified people and ignored highly qualified individuals. The result for the Planning Commission is that since Voigts and Robinson made their changes, we had more PC decisions challenged, more decisions reversed, more projects postponed, and more members absent. Voigts and Robinson themselves recognized the pathetic shape of the PC when they voted to reduce them from 2 to 1 meeting per month. And it was under their reign that these ridiculous plans were passed.

Lesson learned - politics and cronyism do not belong in Lake Forest. People should be appointed who have the highest qualifications, not because of their relationship with City Council members.

DON’T LOOK AT THE PLANS, JUST SAY “YES”

Another key element is an amendment pushed by Andrew Hamilton to remove plans for the City Council package. This explains why, in May 2015, when we reviewed the bids on the construction project at SRR, there were no plans available to us. The Council voted on the bids without being able to see the plans themselves. Of course this was a vote on the bids for a project that had been approved years earlier, in 2013 and 2014 (before Hamilton and I were on the Council). Yet when I went looking at the Council agenda associated with those approvals, I still couldn’t find the plans. So here is another cause of the problem. The policy of having a Council vote of plans they are not shown seems to be a policy fraught with pitfalls.

Lesson learned - Hamilton’s amendment needs to be changed and the policy of keeping plans “in the back of the room” or “in the Public Works Department” needs to be revised.

OVERSIGHT

Even though the Planning Commission has been reduced to an after- thought, and even though plans are not reaching the City Council, in my mind there still is no excuse for these plans being approved. We have highly paid staff and an even more highly paid City Manager. Regardless of any other consideration, the “buck stops there”, as Councilman Nick said last night.

If this were the first time we made a major mistake, one could dismiss it as an aberrant factor. But mistakes are getting to be de rigueur. I pointed out in previous articles that Public Works re-modeled Tamarisk Park only to realize after the fact that they forgot to put in disabled pedestrian access. That costs us a pretty penny. Earlier this year they mistakenly put out an RFP that was not responsive to the City Council’s instructions, and as a result, we lost the opportunity to save $200,000 on our street sweeping contract.

Lesson learned – the mistakes at SRR are not an isolated event. We need to improve our way of doing things to avoid these types of costly mistakes.

“WE HEAR YOU” BUT WE’RE STILL NOT GOING TO ACT

The first signs that something was rotten in Portola Hills came in late August when residents began to write the City and express their concerns about the dangers. The rumble grew to a roar, but the City and my colleagues (Voigts, Robinson, and Hamilton) refused to respond, telling everyone that the project would be finished and after that was done, we would re-assess and possibly modify. We now learn this wasn’t true. Apparently the City staff was concerned with the problem, but didn’t want to admit it and didn’t want to tell the people that they were looking at alternatives. Hence, when my colleagues (Voigts, Robinson, and Hamilton) were served with recall papers, the City was able to respond quickly and effectively, meeting with citizens, coming up with revised plans, and putting the item on the agenda even though my colleagues (you know who) voted against this action.

It’s great that we are now headed in the right direction, but it shouldn’t take a recall petition to instigate these changes, and our City staff should be more honest with us about what’s going on. Instead of saying “We hear you” they should have said “Yes, We too are worried. We’re working on alternatives and as soon as we have a viable plan in place we’ll get back to you.”

Lesson learned –we need to be responsive to the needs of our citizens, and we need to be honest in communicating with them.

MOVING FORWARD

The City plans to introduce the change orders at the next Council meeting. They include adding bike lanes on boith sides, reducing (possibly eliminating) the medians. I’ve also asked them to address the problems of drainage, lighting, and the use of drinking water in the medians. They have also been asked to look at the speeding problem. Many people report that the speeding is still a problem.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss the animal control issue.

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 Dec 12 at 2 pm at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.