Lake Forest 2018 Part 2 (Safety)

I’m spending a week going through our achievements during the past 4 years. Yesterday I discussed Finances. Today I’ll discuss Public Safety.

KEEPING US SAFE

• Homeless Shelter. With all the odds against us, including 13 Mayors, 5 Supervisors and a Federal Judge trying to build a 400-bed homeless shelter on the outskirts of Lake Forest, I stood up and said “No”. I convinced them to try another way, and kept Lake Forest from having 400 homeless people on our doorsteps every day. Mayor Pro Tem Basile and City Manager Debra Rose helped me achieve this goal. (See Photo)
• Child Safety. Working closely with our Police Chief, I pushed for an advanced child safety class and for a workshop on internet predators, both of which were created and have been a success. (See Photo)
• Online Neighborhood Watch. I brought in the leading door-front monitoring company and together we are trying to shape a city-wide online Neighborhood Watch. We are in the early stages but this promises to be a great asset to all of us. (See Photo)
• Protecting Neighborhoods. Working with our City Attorney I pushed for a “transitory housing” ordinance that protects the nature of our single family neighborhoods. We have been successful on more than a dozen occasions. As a result we have fewer sober living homes, birthing homes, and Airbnb homes in our city than our neighboring cities, and the costs to do this have been minimal.
• Police Support. I helped create and continue to assist our First Responders Grab n’ Go which is a volunteer program that supports our Police. Thanks to Michelle Tan and Larissa Clark who took the leadership of this group. They expanded to other cities and are working with the Fire stations to come up with a similar program. (See Photos)
• Accident Report. I pushed for creation of a “Intersection Collision Report” to guide us in how we could do a better job. It was finally completed this year in March and has been helpful.
• Active Shooter. I met with the SVUSD Superintendent and with our Police Chief to insure that our “Active Shooter” protocols were up-to-date and to offer any support the City could. Debra Rose assisted here.
• Homeless Care. We completely upgraded our program to help homeless people and have been successful in preventing any local families from becoming homeless. We successfully got about one third of those homeless off the street and into some form of transitional housing. Carlo Tomaino and Debra Rose worked closely with me to get this done.
• Parking Enforcement. To deal with the increased parking problems I pushed for an additional officer to handle these problems, allowing the existing Police to spend more time on crime fighting. This additional person nearly doubled our ability to cite errant drivers. (See Photo)

All of these efforts undoubtedly contribute to the fact that in the past four years Lake Forest has had the lowest crime rate in our history. Not only have these been our lowest crime rate years, we are now among those cities in Orange County that have the lowest crime rates. Previously we had one of the highest crime rates in the County.

Next time we’ll look at Communications and Business

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest where he serves as Mayor. 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.