Lake Forest - PMS

The PMS in the title refers to our “Per Meeting Schizophrenia”.

I’ve been concerned for some time with the length of City Council meetings. Since the new Council came on board in 2014 meetings have never lasted so long. Often we go beyond 10:30 pm and once we even went beyond Midnight. Everyone knows that decision making gets less optimal as fatigue sets in, so having such long meetings is obviously problematic.

Before you make a judgment on this issue, consider the fact that we also have some of the shortest meetings on record. Often we quit before 9 pm, and sometimes even before 8 pm. Having extra-long and extra-short meetings are obviously related.

I wondered if this was a Lake Forest problem or whether all cities suffered from a similar problem. So I examined more than a dozen websites from our nearest neighbors and looked at the start and finish times for Council meetings in the past 2 months.

GOOD NEWS

The good news is that among more than a dozen cities we are the best with regard to putting up our minutes. Some cities still haven’t posted minutes from July, but in Lake Forest you can read the minutes from our first meeting in September. What a great job our City Clerk and her staff are doing.

In fact, I found only 2 other cities that I could compare us with – Rancho and Mission Viejo. Fortunately both are close neighbors, and RSM has slightly fewer people and MV has slightly more. So not only can we compare, we might get some information on the influence of City size on meeting length.

BAD NEWS

The bad news is that, as I suspected, we are the worst.

In terms of average length, we averaged over 2 hours while MV was slightly less and RSM was only an hour and a half.

More telling, in terms of the standard deviation, we were twice as high as RSM and four times as high as MV. The data are:

• · Lake Forest – Range from 38 minutes to 4 hours 37 minutes
• · RSM – Range from 48 minutes to 2 hours 32 minutes
• · MV – Range from 123 to 2 hours 38 minutes

MV was far more stable than RSM, which in turn was far more stable than Lake Forest.

Among the 18 meetings held (6 for each City), Lake Forest had the two longest (going over 3 and 4 hours) meetings and 2 of the 3 shortest (38 and 51 minutes). Neither RSM or MV went over 3 hours and the longest sessions for either City were 2 and a half hours.

(This article was written before the Sept 20 Council meeting, which went just shy of 3 hours – longer than any MV or RSM meeting)

THE MAYOR’S ROLE

As if we needed another reason to validate the claim that Andy Hamilton is the worst Mayor in our history, or that he doesn’t act in the public interest, the latest data supports this conclusion.

Needless to say, one of the reasons that under Hamilton meetings take so long is that Hamilton punishes the residents by declaring “time-out”. This adds time to the meetings, and Hamilton is so out of control that he sometimes declares two or more “time-outs” in a single meeting. Given that “time out” is administered for laughing, clapping, and even talking, it’s pretty easy to be punished by Hamilton. And even if the blade isn’t sent hurtling to the neck, Hamilton’s droning on about proper behavior is also time-consuming.

When he isn’t administering “time out” or lecturing residents about proper behavior, Hamilton lately has turned to lecturing his colleagues about “leadership principles”. I find this curious, since Hamilton had the chance to censure his good friend Dwight Robinson for calling his colleagues “imbecile”, “moron”, “liar”, etc. yet Hamilton refused to do so. It’s hard to find a better example of violating the City’s code than Robinson’s behavior, yet Hamilton refrained from censuring him.

A few minutes of lecturing about “leadership”, a few minutes lecturing the residents about “proper behavior”, and the administration of “time outs” have surely contributed to our extra-long sessions.

THE GANG OF 3’S ROLE

In addition to Hamilton’s lectures and his application of “time out”, there have been more public comments from people than ever before, largely as a result of the bad decisions being made by the Gang of 3, and sometimes about their behavior.

Comparing the 3 cities, Lake Forest averages nearly 6 public commentators while MV averages slightly more than 2 and RSM averages 1.5. Consider the fact that MV has more people than LF, yet we have more than twice as many people speaking at public comment. On a population basis, we have 7.6 speakers per 100,000 residents compared to RSM which has less than half (3.1) and MV which has a third (2.5).

Discontent with the Gang of 3 was behind the recent recall, in which more than 6,600 registered voters signed petitions wanting to throw these guys out of office. It obviously shows up in the Council chambers.

THE SCHEDULE

When you add up the time taken by Hamilton’s lectures and time-outs, and the extra time for discontented residents to complain, you still can’t account for the extra-long and extra-short meeting lengths. This belongs to the fact that some meetings have several major issues on the agenda, and other meetings have nothing consequential. Why on Earth would you schedule meetings in this manner?

Often we’re told that an item is being presented and there is no time to review because the deadline to submit the item to other agencies is nearby. Why would you wait 11 months to present a report that is due in the twelfth month?

SUMMARY

Compared to other cities, we have both longer and shorter meetings, and the bottom line is that our meetings go much too long, and go beyond 10:30 pm far too often. The extra-long meetings do not help the decision making process, nor do they invite citizen participation.

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 in November at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.