Million Dollar Baby - Part 1

This is the first in a 5 part series on "Bad City Reports". I've chosen this report to start the series because the co-authors of this report are Bob Dunek (City Manager), Tom Wheeler (Public Works Director), and Doug Anderson (Traffic Management Consultant). Collectively the City of Lake Forest pays more than $1,000,000 per year to employ these men. Here's what you get for $1,000,000 a year.

I’ve raised the issue several times that reports from City staff can be woefully lacking in accuracy and in the validity of their assumptions and approaches. This is a major problem for a City, because most of the decisions made by the staff and/or the council rely upon these reports. If these reports are seriously flawed, then the decisions themselves run the risk of being seriously flawed. In the past, some of the examples I’ve pointed out included the following –

•  Failure to come up with a comparable CNG fueling station to form the basis for projecting the likely traffic in Lake Forest if a CNG fueling station was built
•  Failure to identify underlying patterns that determine whether or not rental units would be more likely to be owner occupied.
•  Mistakes in listing the number of new homes planned for the city.
•  Failure to come up with a comparable city waste recycling program to form the basis for projecting the likely needs for staff assistance in a recycling program for Lake Forest.

These are but a few of the examples cited in the last year and I don’t want to dwell on them here.

Last week we had another example with the City’s report - “Discussion of a Potential City of Lake Forest Traffic and Parking Commission and Alternatives”. The Council relies upon this report to determine whether our city should have such a committee.

Here's my analysis -

MAJOR FLAW – NO DEPENDENT VARIABLE

There are many flaws in that report, some of them minor and some of them major. The most serious major problem with the report is that there is no indication of what a traffic committee can accomplish. The report goes into great detail about how many staff hours are required to service a committee, and has a little information about the topics they discuss, but absolutely nothing about what they accomplish. This is a major omission. Who really cares how many staff hours it requires to staff a committee. The important point is what does it accomplish?. Once we know what it accomplishes, we can best judge whether or not the amount of staff time required is productive. For example, if the City of Brea has reduced their traffic accidents by 30% since instituting a traffic committee, is that worth the 5 hours a month it takes to staff their committee? If the City of Laguna Hills reduced the traffic deaths by 3 people a year after starting their traffic commission, does that justify the 19 hours a month of staff time. If Mission Viejo’s traffic commission helped reduce the time stuck in traffic by 5 minutes per day for all 700,000 vehicle trips every day, does that warrant staff spending 45 hours per month? Hopefully, you get the point.

It’s impossible to look only at the cost (in these cases, staff hours) and not on the benefits, which can include cost savings. If we have fewer traffic accidents as a result of a traffic commission, we use less Police time investigating those accidents, and the savings in Police time may far outweigh the costs of staffing the committees.

But no one on the Council will be able to make these types of calculations because the staff only looked at the cost, and not the benefits. It reminds me of the time, not so long ago, when the staff did a report on the costs of having a local animal shelter, and only looked at the expense side of the ledger, forgetting apparently that the revenue from adoption fees, licenses, etc. can be nearly as lucrative as the costs of the shelter.

I suspect that this type of thinking is borne out of self-interest. After all, few of our staff actually live in Lake Forest, so any benefits that accrue to the citizens do not accrue to them. In the case of a traffic committee, they seem far more worried about the fact that it will require them to spend time on helping service this committee, and less concerned that those of us who live here will spend less time stuck in traffic.

Tomorrow we’ll look at some more major flaws in this study. And bear in mind, we, the taxpayers, are paying out more than $1,000,000 a year to the people who co-authored this report.