Priorities for the 5-Year Business Plan

Yesterday we looked at demographic figures and results from the City’s satisfaction survey to get some guidance for approaching the 5-Year Strategic Business Plan. Today I want to list my priorities.

You can learn about a book or a report by covering the table of contents. The last time the City looked at their 5-Year Strategic Business Plan, the table of contents looked like this –

• · TRAFFIC
• · PUBLIC SAFETY
• · COMMUNITY SERVICES & FACILITIES (Create Sports Park, Improving parks, Civic Center, Special Needs programming)
• · ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (Redevlopment, Housing)
• · FINANCIAL STABILITY
• · COMMUNITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING (OSA neighborhood development (4070 new units, 11,800 new residents), Nearby Communities, Irvine (Great Park),Rancho Mission Viejo)
• · ENVIRONMENTAL (Water Quality, Flood Control, Landscaping, Solid Waste)
• · ORGANIZATIONAL (Active, engaged community, Contract model, “Sound fiscal practices”, IT, Communications, Transparency, HR)

To the extent that the order of the table of contents reflects an order of importance, I’m going to suggest a very different order for our discussions –

1. FINANCIAL

a. Without adequate financial resources, nothing else is possible.

b. The City has received millions of dollars in one-time fees (from developers) and embarked on expensive building programs which require operational, maintenance, and replacement costs on an ongoing basis. We need to be sure that we have sufficient funds to operate our existing capital improvements, and also that any new capital spending takes into account the ongoing costs.

c. The OC Sheriff Department is raising our contract fees for police services by a staggering amount that will impact our budget. To offset this, where we can, we need to aggressively cut costs and increase revenues. I’ve seen little evidence of cost cutting or revenue generation in the past.

d. We need to focus our spending on local people and businesses so that we benefit from the sales tax and the money stays in the City. To date we have not done this. Related to this, we need to continue to support local businesses and attract new businesses. Jessica Gonzales in our Economic Development division has done a great job here and this needs to continue.

e. We need to carefully study land use decisions so that we make decisions that best suit our financial needs at the moment and in the future. Each land use type (commercial, residential, office, industrial) has associated with it an income and an expense, and we need to do research in this area in order to make good decisions. To date we have not done this.

f. Our investment policy is ridiculous. We have millions in the bank and we are earning much less than ½ of 1% and this has been going on for years. Thanks to Councilman Hamilton we are now going to revise the policy so that the City earns more money. I am part of a 3-person committee to work on this important project.

2. PUBLIC SAFETY

a. If Job #1 for a City is to remain financially healthy, Job #2 is to insure the public safety.

b. The crime rate in Lake Forest is higher than in most of our surrounding cities. That’s a fact the City likes to hide but it is a fact nonetheless. Why is our crime rate higher than our neighbors? We need to study our crime statistics and our use of Police services and determine why we have such a relatively high crime rate. Bear in mind that along with a relatively high crime rate goes a relatively high cost of fighting crime. Our cost per capita (as reflected in the 2014 Laguna Hills Police study) at $160.97 is the fourth highest among 6 cities studied (Aliso Viejo, RSM, and Laguna Niguel have lower rates).

c. We have an excellent STARS program that saves the City hundreds of thousands of dollars. Why are we not aggressively expanding that program?

d. We have a Neighborhood Watch program but there are no statistics to show us if it is doing any good. Let’s see what is and isn’t working and then expand the program. Nothing is more important that preventing crime.

e. With the new homes being build and 12,000+ more people moving into the community, the need for Police services is going to increase. We need to work smarter, switch from the current model to community policing, and do more preventive work in order to avoid the Public Safety budget dwarfing everything else the City does.

f. We should establish an ad hoc Public Safety Committee to study this vast and important area, and then make recommendations that will improve our services.

3. ORGANIZATIONAL

a. While there are pockets of excellence in the City, there are too many times when poor decisions are made or inadequate reports are produced. Bad reports lead to bad decisions, and bad decisions result in increased costs.

b. For example, we updated Tamarisk Park but someone forgot to put in an access entrance for the disabled. Having to retrofit a new access will cost a lot more money than doing it right the first time. For example, we built a sign in Alton Park that didn’t match what the community wanted. Re-building the sign will cost thousands more. For example, we have been contracting for every week street sweeping even though it’s commonplace for other cities to use every-other week in parts of the years where there is little debris. This has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in excess spending. For example, we allowed the problems at Village Pond Park to fester to such an extent we had a botulism breakout and now we are spending more than $1 million to repair the park. Intervention earlier could have saved us a lot of money. For example…

c. We need to foster a “pursuit of excellence” from our staff. Doing an adequate job is not acceptable to me, and while we do have some staff who have this yearning to excel, it is largely lacking throughout the system.

4. TRAFFIC

a. This is the residents #1 concern year after year. The reason it is the #1 concern year after year is that it’s not getting appreciably better, and with 64,000 new vehicle trips per day as a result of the new homes, things are only going to get worse.

b. Our current approach to solving the traffic congestion problem is twofold: traffic light synchronization and intersection changes. These are both important initiatives, but neither one are sufficient to solve our problems, and both have flaws. We need a central vision and an overall plan that takes into account a multitude of factors beyond the two that we depend on almost exclusively.

c. The long awaited Traffic Committee needs to have been started years ago, but we are still waiting.

These are the four most important areas of concern from my POV. Next time I will explore additional areas.

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 2 pm to 5 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a mini town meeting every moth. The next meeting will be April 18 from 2 to 4 pm at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.

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