Why is the City Council Still Waiting for Godot?

Last week we looked at the waiting list for items that should come before the Council. Many of these items have financial considerations and the City could be saving and/or earning more money for the City if these items came to fruition. Apart from financial considerations, many have procedural implications that could help the City do a better job. Others are strictly quality of life issues.

These items waiting to be discussed are listed in terms of how long they have been lingering, and not by importance.

VILLAGE POND PARK (Jan 6, 2015)

The problem with Village Pond Park has been the fact that people feed the ducks and geese, they multiply, get comfortable, and defecate and urinate to such an extent that humans cannot use the Park, and the food they are being given harms the animals’ health. For more than a year the City stalled on putting forth an ordinance. Then once it was enacted, they were tasked with an evaluation component, but staff never evaluated the impact of the ordinance. Anecdotes from City staff tell us that the card and sign program has been successful in reducing the numbers of ducks/geese, but we don’t know for sure, and as far as I know there is no data on the extent to which the feces problem has been solved. One nearby resident tells me it’s just as bad as ever, but who knows? This is important because the Council is going to be given a proposal to spend over $1,000,000 on a park re-design that has as a major component, reduction in the number of ducks/geese. If we’ve solved the problem with the ordinance, we can probably save hundreds of thousands of dollars in needless design features. Years ago I suggested to the Council that the ordinance program would be sufficient to reduce the problem, but staff and Council refused to enact the ordinance and instead spent $250,000 to date and may spend another $1,000,000 more. This is an enormous waste of taxpayer money, and the continued failure to produce an evaluation of the effects of the ordinance, in advance of the design, is difficult to understand.

COUNCIL CONSENSUS (Jan 6, 2015)

At the behest of Councilman Robinson, the Council consensus was increased for 2 to 3, meaning that to get an item on the agenda it now needed 3 Council votes instead of 2. I had some hesitations so I asked that the staff do a report and let us know how many agenda items did not make it onto the agenda because they lost 2 to 3. The Council asked that the report come back in 6 months. We are still waiting. Meanwhile at the last meeting alone, two requests for consensus were defeated that otherwise would have survived under the old system. One speaker during the Public Comments section bemoaned the change, saying that it struck at the very heart of democracy and put control into the hands of a click. We need that analysis and we need to reconsider the change.

ASSETS AND NEEDS (April 21, 2015)

The Council has endorsed the idea that the proper way to go about our capital improvement program is to conduct an inventory of all assets, to catalogue the differing needs, analyze the trends, and then match, to the extent possible, our needs and our assets. Here are some questions we should be asking -

· In a City where the number of children is decreasing and the number of seniors is increasing, should we be building more active parks?

· Should a senior center be built in an area where there are very few seniors?

· What are the needs of the 12,000 new residents who are going to come into the City?

For some unfathomable reason, the staff has stalled on this initiative. Yet we are preparing to go ahead and spend millions of dollars on plans without doing the proper homework first. In my opinion, nothing should be initiated until we’ve done this comprehensive planning. Yet we cannot even get this topic placed on the agenda.

SUPPORTING THE ARTS (March 31, 2015)

The Council asked the staff to do more to support Lake Forest residents involved in the arts. Among the topics discussed was (a) using the walls at City Hall and the Sports Center to display art, (b) hiring Lake Forest residents for all artistic performances required by Development Services (e.g., face painters, balloon artists, singers, dancers, etc.), and (c) holding art shows in conjunction with our summer music festivals. To date, the only thing the City managed to do was to hold one art show in conjunction with one music show. Nothing has been done to use the City Hall or the Sports Park to display art, nor to seek Lake Forest residents as artists in programs supported by the City. This has the potential to be a boon to our residents. Why aren’t we doing anything?

LEGAL ISSUES INSPECTING GARAGES (April 7, 2015)

Most people in Lake Forest don’t use their garages to park their 2 cars. Many don’t even park 1 car in their garage. Instead, garages often are used for storage and there are even people using their garages as recreation rooms. To some extent that’s their business. If they want to park their cars on the street, that’s a decision they make. But in the past few years groups of people who park their cars on the street instead of in their garage have been asking the City to give them exclusive use of the public street. They want permits so that they can have exclusive use of the City streets and keep their garages for storage and recreation.

Recently I went through a neighborhood that was requesting such a permit and more than half the garages were being used for storage. People who had 2 spaces in their garages and another 2 to 3 spaces in their driveways were asking to be given exclusive rights to use the public streets and deny the use to people in a nearby apartment complex who had less than 2 spaces per unit for their use. IOW people with 4+ spaces to use were asking for exclusive use of an area that was being used by people who only had 1+ spaces to use. It’s simply not fair.

I asked the City Attorney to provide us with a legal opinion about whether or not we could require that any group asking for exclusive use of City streets be required to allow City staff to inspect their garages to be sure that they are being used, before we take away public property. We are still waiting.

COUNCIL USE OF LAWYER TIME (May 5, 2015)

Some of my colleagues were worried that I was over-using the time of our City Attorney. My concern is to avoid the kinds of legal problems that previous Councils created. For example,

· They authored an ordinance against day laborers only to have to cancel it (under threat of a lawsuit) without ever putting it into operation.

· They authored a sex offender ordinance only to have to cancel it (under threat of a lawsuit).

I’m pleased to say that since I joined the Council we have not been sued nor have we sued anyone. If the price of doing that is a few discussions with our City Attorney, who is here anyway under contract, I think it’s a great deal.

In any event, we are still waiting for that report.

PLANS FOR 25TH ANNIVERSARY (May 5, 2015)

Lake Forest will be 25 years old in a year. The Council asked for some plans. We are still waiting. A few months ago I was at a Brea City Council meeting and the idea of a 100 year anniversary came up, and before the meeting was over they already had a committee formed and ideas were being thrown about. We have gone 5 months and nothing, as far as I know, has come back to the Council.

CITY WEBSITE (May 19, 2015)

The Council asked the City staff to incorporate links to local non-profit organizations and include their activities in the City calendar. Take a look at the City website and you won’t find anything different from what was up there months/years ago.

The Council asked that the page “Fallen Officers” be re-labeled “Fallen Heroes” and that Fire Department personnel who died in the service of the community be included. That also hasn’t been done.

IMPROVE CITY PROPERTY (June 2, 2015)

As part of a discussion of parks in the City, the City Manager was instructed to make improvements to the City owned land which looks really poor. Whispering Hills is especially bad looking and devalues all the land around it. To date, nothing has happened and Whispering Hills looks as bad as it did 4 months ago.

PARADE COSTS (June 16, 2015)

Four months ago the Council had a discussion of the parade costs and it looked like we might be paying excessively for some items, such as renting cars. The Council asked for a report back so that the issue could be studied and some costs savings might result. We are still waiting. Of course the Parade Committee doesn’t start working until January, so the delay on this item doesn’t have an impact yet.

ANIMAL CARE (July 7, 2015)

To the best of my knowledge, the staff has done very little about the Council’s request to work with other cities to study alternatives to the Orange County animal shelter. In the interim, I (a) personally contacted a half dozen prominent companies who work in this field, (b) gathered more than a dozen comparable studies that have been done along these lines, (c) got data from OCAC that describes the animal care statistics needed to do any comparative analysis, (d) did some preliminary calculations on the construction costs, and (e) set up a meeting with the President of Shelter Planners of America (SPA), the nations’ #1 provider of needs analysis investigations. I also spoke at a Board of Supervisor’s meeting and provided them with studies about this issue. Tomorrow (Tuesday) I plan to speak again.

As top City activities, a city staff member did attend the meeting with SPA, and on October 12 our Mayor and City Manager met with the staff and Manager from Laguna Hills to begin their work – 3 months after the request. Interestingly enough, the letter from our Mayor to representatives in RSM and SJC told them they “have unique circumstances” and “may not be available to attend…” and guess what?! They didn’t attend!

FWIW – you may think that a 3 month delay is actually some pretty fast work given the way City governments function. When I raised that point at the meeting with the SPA President, Rose Tingle, who attended, asked “For how many issues is it actually a life and death situation. Nearly 200 animals a week are being killed at OCAC, so the more we delay, the more this terrible situation continues.”

POLICE “COST SAVING” PROGRAMS (July 21, 2015)

During the discussions on the Police contract, in which my colleagues (Voigts-Robinson-Hamilton) refused to allow the City to seek competitive bids, the issue was raised about “cost savings” programs and the Council instructed the City Manager to report back. Three months later we are still waiting. Who knows how much money we could be saving?

PACE PROGRAMS (Sept 1, 2015)

PACE programs allow home owners to pay for energy efficient upgrades through their mortgage. Each program has to be individually approved. Rather than spend time every meeting looking at another such program the Council asked the City staff to bring back all the programs and have an omnibus meeting in which we approved (or dis-approved) all the programs. This one is on the agenda for Oct 20.

BUDGETARY ISSUES

There are also several budget-related items on the waiting list (e.g., SVUSD cost sharing, CDBG analysis of declining spending on seniors and homeless) but these items are legitimately on hold as they aren’t needed until the next budget meeting.

SUMMARY

Over a dozen issues sit on the waiting list. If/when resolved they have the potential to save us money, improve our quality of life, and improve the way that the City does business. Meanwhile my colleagues (Voigts-Robinson-Hamilton) schedule spa days and the people setting the agenda waste our time on issues that may nor may not come up at some time in the future.

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 mini town meeting every month. The next meeting will be on December 12 at 2 pm at the El Toro Public Library.

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