The big item on this week’s City Council agenda is the selection of the new Planning Commissioner. We covered this over the weekend with 2 articles. Click here to review.
Other items of interest coming up Tuesday night -
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PURPLE HEART CITY (Item #2)
The City is going to issue a proclamation designating Lake Forest a “Purple Heart City” in honor of our veterans. With hypocrisy dripping gingerly from their lips, the City Council will vote to honor our veterans, yet for the past few months they have steadfastly refused to activate the Lake Forest Community Foundation that could establish a permanent Military Support Committee that could really honor our veterans with more than the lip service the Council intends to pay on Tuesday night. A more appropriate name would be “Black Heart City” – we are one of the only cities in OC that doesn’t support a non-profit foundation. Millions of dollars are being raised every year to help people in other cities while our City Council refuses to act.
Find out what's happening in Lake Forestwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
PS - Kudos to Tom Cagley and Jim Rosenberg for working outside the City to create a Military Support Committee.
PORTOLA STREETSCAPE/WIDENING (Item #9)
The City proposes to add a third lane to Portola Parkway between the Southbound 241 off ramp and Rancho Parkway. To get this project moving, $30,000 will be spent for design services.
COMMUNITY TRAFFIC EDUCATION FORUMS (Item #13)
Since the City refuses to create a Traffic Committee (more than a dozen cities in OC have one), they offer the residents an olive branch with a series of “education” forums about traffic, designed to mollify the people who believe that we have serious traffic problems in our city. The Council believes that if people only knew what the City is doing, they would be happy with the poorly designed streets, the absence of right hand turn lanes where they are needed, the long delays, the traffic lights that are not responsive to traffic flows, etc.
City consultant Doug Anderson and City employee Tom Wheeler will be responsible for the program. Bear in mind these two highly paid people recently gave us such poorly written and researched reports they were featured as part of a “Bad Report Series”. Click here and here for stories about those reports.
Anderson and Wheeler propose 3 forums, to be held at 3 unspecified locations, at 3 unspecified times, which will contain an unspecified curriculum, for an unspecified cost, with unspecified performance criteria. Sounds good so far! It’s especially good for Anderson who bills the City for $200+ per hour for his services.
The “engagement” process that the City proposes is remarkably similar to the process we just went through on the Village Pond Park (VPP). Readers of the “City Watch” column know how well this went. Not only did the City not come up with a plan to address the problems at Village Pond Park, they seemingly managed to violate the Brown Act in the process. Now, nearly a year after they started the VPP project, nothing has changed nor are there any cogent plans for any change.
(BTW – the City staff discuss it’s “Bi-Annual Resident and Business Survey” tool in this report, once more patting themselves on the back for the results, which in reality are not very impressive since nearly every City that pays to have its residents assess their satisfaction, gets a great report (In fact, in a short time I’ll have a report revealing the truth about these surveys). In any event, what’s curious about this staff report is the admission that the questions they ask on the survey are poorly constructed. The staff note – “the meaning of the word ‘traffic’ could potentially have a variety of interpretations.”)
The solution to our traffic problems will not come from educational forums that tell people what is happening or what hopes the City has for the future. This process will cost a lot of money, far more than the costs of a traffic committee, yet one of the reasons for refusing to create a traffic committee was the cost factor. The goal of the process, as indicated in the staff report, is to get citizen involvement. Yet citizen input could be gathered far better by having a traffic committee. So we are going to enact a process that costs more and gets less. Is that any way to run a City?
Tomorrow we unveil the first occupants of Lake Forest’s “House of Ill Repute” That article was intended for publication last week, but the series on “Crime in Lake Forest 2013” bumped it forward. If you missed that series, please go back and read it because it contains valuable information not available anywhere else.
