Looking Back - Part 1

At the end of each year I like to look back and see what the city has done and then view my own accomplishments. Here is my assessment for the city and then I’ll take a look at my own accomplishments.

The current analysis will look at two things – (1) how the city handled the normal business of government and (2) how we handled new initiatives.

Overall we’re doing well.

Generally speaking government just plods along. The good news is that we have plenty of money in the bank, extremely few debts, and no major lawsuits. Many cities can’t make the same claim, so in that sense we are doing very well.

We are handling more issues than ever.

In addition, compared to many other City Councils, and compared to how we used to function, we are handling far more issues, largely due to the interests of this Council to see more things created or improved.

We are solving more problems than ever.

Also on the positive side, this year the City handled more than twice as many requests from residents to help address problems in their areas. These requests ranged far and wide. In August and September I personally sent nearly 40 requests to city staff asking them to address, among other things,

• Noise
• Problems with the website
• Cat licensing
• Excess charges by the County
• Fish die off at Village Pond Park
• Pet adoption problems
• Use of pesticides at schools
• Busing for school children
• Violations of city ordinance on transitory housing
• Parking on Osterman
• Cleanup of Serrano Creek
• Landscape problems
• Crime in various areas
• Parking problems in various areas

About half the time these issues were resolved to everyone’s satisfaction in a reasonable time. As pathetic as this might seem to some, for City work, and given the enormous number of issues being addressed, this is pretty impressive.

But chronic problems remain.

If you dig a little deeper, our performance is less remarkable. We have chronic problems such as traffic and parking, and we are making little headway in dealing with either of these problems. We should do better.

Crime isn’t decreasing.

Our crime rate goes up and down, but nothing that is alarming, and when compared to most cities in our area, we are actually doing better than we have for the past decade. That doesn’t mean we don’t have problems. From January through October we had 17 rapes (13% increase over last year), 83 aggravated assaults (32% increase), 20 robberies (67% increase), 145 burglaries (28% increase) and 17 stolen vehicles (17% increase). We should do better.

Homelessness is growing.

Every day it looks like there are more homeless people in the city. It’s probably a result of the pressure being put on the homeless elsewhere in the County. Panhandling has increased and there are reports of public urination and defecation. We’re doing nothing to prepare for these increases and this worries me. We were doing a good job in the past, but I’m not sure we have any real plans for dealing with a 10% or 20% increase.

We lack proactive policing

Our Police policy remains reactive. We do little that’s proactive or preventive. Last year we had a great program that impacted some of our Type 2 crimes, but since then there have been no new initiatives. The Council asked Mayor Voigts to work on this problem but he never convened a meeting and so nothing has been done.

We’re punting too often.

Our administrative track record is poor. We’ve taken much too long to get proposals to the Council, and then, because of the inadequacies of the RFP responses, we’ve had to punt. For example, we punted this past week with regard to finding grant writing services, last month with utility cost recovery, etc. I think a month doesn’t go by when we don’t have to revisit an issue. That makes for an enormous waste of time, on everyone’s part. And I’m not just referring to staff and Council. If we can’t get it right and keep asking companies to re-submit, at some point those companies are no longer going to respond to our requests. Even my colleagues are now critical of staff’s performance in this area.

No worse than before.

While our overall performance is less than satisfactory from my perspective, it certainly is no worse than previous accomplishments. In itself that’s depressing because it implies that city government is a vast wasteland and nothing can be done to improve our performance. I believe we can do better and I’ll continue to do my part.

Consider the extra stressors.

A final note has to address some of the stressors placed on staff. We hired a new City Manager after decades with the previous city manager, and this was not an easy exercise nor was it without problems. Time and energy had to go into this process and continues to go into this process.

In addition, we had another recall. Though my colleagues kept the recall out of the council room, much to everyone’s credit, the stresses and strains of going through the recall, and the time and energy required by staff, were all additional stressors on the system.

Add to these additional stressors the increase in population as thousands more people move into the city, increasing their demands on city services.

Summary

We’re not particularly doing a better job, but we are handling more issues and addressing more problems, while additional stresses were placed on the staff. I'm disappointed but not appalled, and I look forward to 2018 when we can do better.

Tomorrow I’ll look at how well we are handling new initiatives.

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. You can follopw him on Twitter @DrJimGardner. 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 Thursday, Feb 15, from 7 pm at the Beach and Tennis Club.