Mayor Voigts Cancels Tonight's Council Meeting

Tonight there will be no City Council meeting. It was cancelled by Mayor Scott Voigts and when I asked him to re-schedule a substitute meeting, he refused.

Last week we listed 15 different agenda items that have been languishing on the back burners instead of being handled by the City Council. Some of these items go back more than a year. Why then would we be cancelling a meeting without re-scheduling a replacement meeting so that we can catch up? And why should we be concerned? Let’s look at some of the reasons.

Some of the items not being addressed have direct economic consequences. The most obvious example is the Ad Hoc Committee on Investment Income. Almost immediately after being created months ago I met with my fellow committee members and together we formulated a policy which we anticipated would earn us hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional interest income with very little additional risk. But that policy requires City Council approval, so every month we delay bringing this policy back to the Council for approval, potentially we are losing thousands of dollars.

Fostering Art in the City has a potential to increase the income for dozens of Lake Forest artists. Their increased income in turn will generate more sales tax for the City. Yet the walls of the City Hall and the Sports Center remain bare.

The evaluation ordered by the Council of the Wildlife Feeding Prohibition Ordinance was requested prior to examining the plans for the re-modeling of Village Pond Park. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars that will be proposed to spend on the Park in order to reduce the numbers of ducks and geese, yet none of these expensive structural items may be necessary. But we don’t have the results of that evaluation and we are getting ready to spend more than we should. Let’s get the evaluation on the agenda before the plans are reviewed and see where we are. Let’s save money where we can.

Income from our hotels is a major revenue source for the City, and if we can find better ways for the Hotels to generate money, that means even more funds flow, not merely to the hotels but to the restaurants and shops. Yet after a very successful Hotel Roundtable, we have yet to convene the recommended second roundtable. At the first roundtable, the participants had very good ideas for increasing their revenue and competing on a stronger basis with our neighbors. We need to follow through, get these ides to the Council, and help our local businesses make even more money.

It became obvious shortly after the Sports Park opened that we had failed to anticipate the value of the Park as a destination, especially for sports teams looking for a place to hold tournaments. Imagine the benefit to hotels and to restaurants by having hundreds of visitors using these facilities. Imagine the extra taxes that would flow to the City. Of course, any marketing and promotion of the Sports Park must take into consideration use by the residents, so the issue is not such a simple one. That’s why we need to do an analysis of the best ways to balance the new use of the Park against the traditional use, but to date we’ve had no opportunity to discuss this issue.

Parking is becoming almost as big a problem as traffic, and there have been several requests for parking permits and there are more in the hopper. One of the problems with parking permits is that it takes away taxpayer property (city streets) from other taxpayers and gives it to an exclusive group of people. Generally speaking it’s not a good idea to take taxpayer property and give it to an exclusive group. It’s even less of a good idea when the people asking for the land are using their garages for storage and recreation rooms. Now, because they don’t have access to their own garages, they want to get exclusive use of the streets, denying the taxpayer streets to other people who live in the City. To guard against this, I asked that we insure ourselves that the people asking for the streets are using their own garages as required by law. But we still haven’t had the chance to discuss this at the Council.

You can see from this brief discussion, that the issues that are sitting on the back burner have some major impact on our quality of life as well as on our pocketbook.

How, in all good conscience, can Mayor Scott Voigts not re-schedule a special meeting to get to some of these issues?

COMMENTS

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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 3 pm to 5 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a Town Hall meeting every month. The next meeting will be on December 15 at 2 pm at the El Toro Public Library.

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