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Health & Fitness

City Council Preview - Tonight

Yesterday we looked at the Brookfield Home’s desire to reduce the quality of life for our residents by tinkering with the 147 homes they are squeezing into the Auto Center. Today we’ll look at a few more agenda items-

 

CITY MANAGER PERFORMANCE

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In closed session the Council will review the City Manager’s performance. Here are some “open” suggestions to help them in their analysis.


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Honesty – Mr. Dunek is the originator of the terrible lie that “we are one of the safest cities in the U.S.” People like Council members McCullough and Voigts aren’t smart enough to know this is a lie or at best a gross distortion of the facts, so they mindlessly repeat it. But Dunek is smart enough to know that he mis-represented the truth, and this isn’t merely a self-serving attempt to show people he’s doing a good job. It’s a harmful attack on our citizens. It lets them put their guard down and think we are so safe, when in truth, most of our neighbors are safer than we are, and in many respects, we have some real crime problems in the City. Maybe, in fact, one of the reasons we have so much crime compared to our neighbors is that Dunek and the rest have lulled us to sleep when instead we should be aggressively trying to reduce crime, not hiding the fact that it’s comparatively high and on the rise.


Competence – Mr., Dunek has put his signature on some reports that wouldn’t make it out of a freshman course. I’ve covered many of them on these pages. Just to review –

  • Traffic Committee – Among other things, this report had math errors, failed to actually look at what a traffic committee could accomplish, and looked at hours of staff time without realizing that an hour of a clerk’s time is less expensive than a Director’s time.

  • Street Sweeping – A haphazard romp in which not even the basic rudimentaries of sound design were followed, and yet this was used to recommend issuing fines for residents.

  • Animal Shelter – Dunek produced an estimate of the costs of running an animal shelter and they forgot to take into account the revenue (licensing, fines, etc.), resulting in a ridiculous over-statement of the operating costs.

  • His latest brouhaha is a deeply flawed report on “Murder Incidents in South Orange County” in which he allows so many mistakes to be made I had to send him  a detailed list of all the errors. I’ll be devoting a future series to these mistakes, but for right now, take my word – this is another flawed report. 


    Vision – It’s typically not the role of a City Manager to provide the vision for a City, but with some of the duds we’ve had on the Council, stepping up to the plate would have been nice. Instead we have a City with fewer amenities than any other City in South Orange County and with more crime than most of our neighbors. We have more people worried about traffic congestion than any other City around us, and we’re about to make things even worse by adding more than 40,000 vehicle trips per day as a result of permitting 5,000 new homes.


    Focus on Lake Forest – More than anyone else, Dunek is responsible for the fact that so little of our $35,000,000 annual budget is spent in our City, and so few of our $100,000 a year staff live here.

     

    Nest of Vipers – Putting aside the City of Bell, our City Council has been involved in some unsightly shenanigans.  Scott Voigts pretends he’s the Mayor even though he isn’t. Voigts and McCullough tell so many lies while on the dais I have to write entire series to cover them all. Voigts and Robinson are bathing in cash they received from businesses and people for whom they do favors, like awarding contracts. Voigts and Robinson throw out good people and fill our Commission seat with their friends and campaign supporters. Etc. It’s disgusting, and it’s all happening under the nose of Mr. Dunek who, as far as I can tell, does nothing.

    It’s not a pretty picture for a man who gets over $300,000 a year in compensation. To be fair, Mr. Dunek has a lot of virtues and skills that are put to good use running the City, but at his salary, we should expect excellence in everything he does. We’re not getting it.

     

    CONTRACT WITH THE SHERIFF (Item #20)

    The contract with the OC Sheriff’s Department comes up for renewal. How good a job is the Sheriff doing?

    • In the past 3 years there have been more murders in Lake Forest than in 9 other cities in South Orange County combined. We have the most murders on an absolute basis and on a per capita basis.

    • In the past 10 years, out of 12 cities in South Orange County, we have the 4th highest murder rate per capita.

  • When 2013 is compared to 2011-12, we had more murders, forcible rapes, DUI arrests, narcotics violations, vehicular homicides, etc.

  • For more than a year we went without a Neighborhood Watch coordinator.

  • Hmmm. Sounds like the Sheriff needs a Sheriff.

    Meantime, every year the cost of law enforcement goes up, and increasingly occupies a bigger share of our budget.

    Lake Forest is probably too small to command our own Police force, although some smaller cities do this. But right next door we have one of the finest Police Departments in the U.S. Perhaps we should open discussions with the City of Irvine to take over our Police Department. If nothing else it presents a competitive bidding process so that the OC Sheriff won’t take us for granted.

     

    BIDDING ON PROJECTS (Item #24)

    The City is considering revising the policies with respect to purchasing commodities, professional services, and public works projects. With regard to commodities and services, the Council could commit to putting Lake Forest applicants first assuming all other factors are equivalent. The City has resisted doing this for years, despite my demonstrations that there are hundreds of thousands of dollars (perhaps more than a million) going out of the City that could be going into the City.

    Now is the time to stand up and embrace this idea.

    But simply saying “Yes” will not be enough. The City needs to inscribe a process by which Lake Forest applicants will be sought out and the opportunities presented to them. Last year we gave a workshop on how to do business with the City and 80% of the participants came from elsewhere. How stupid was that?

    Saying “yes” to using our money for our people and businesses is one thing. It’s a start. But doing it is the real goal.

     

    See you tonight.

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