Tuesday night is another City Council meeting and there are a few items that will interest you.
NEW POLICE CHIEF (Item #3)
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“There’s a new kid in town” and his name is Bradley Valentine. He’s taking over from the former Police Chief, and quite frankly, it’s none too soon. Under Lt. Higa, who was highly praised by the Council at their last meeting, Lake Forest has become the MURDER CAPITAL OF SOUTH ORANGE COUNTY. Of the 10 cities in Southern California managed by the OC Sheriff’s Department, in the past 3 years, Lake Forest has had more murders than every other city combined! Not only do we lead in murders, we lead in the number of forcible rapes and we’re tied for leadership in vehicular manslaughter. In the next few weeks I’ll have a complete report about crime in Lake Forest, but for now, welcome Lt. Valentine and we really hope you can turn around these serious problems.
BTW – Lt. Valentine began his career with OC SD in 1993. From 2000 to 2007 he worked in Lake Forest (voted Deputy of the Year in 2003) and in 2007 he was promoted to Sergeant. In 2012 he was promoted to Lieutenant and served as Watch Commander at Theo Lacy. He has a BA in Criminal Justice and lives in La Habra.
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QUARTERLY ATTENDANCE (Item #7)
Every quarter the Council checks up on their appointees to the Commissions and sees who’s been playing hooky. Parks and Recreation had perfect attendance, although given how poorly they managed to find the dog park and to clean up the Village Pond Park during that time, we might have been happier if some of them missed those meetings.
Planning, on the other hand, had our two newest appointees, Andrew Hamilton and Jolene Fuentes, with absences, while the remaining 3 members (Brower, Verplancke, and Zechmeister) attended all the meetings. Fuentes, you’ll recall, led the list of absentee Commissioners in the previous quarter. On a proportional basis her record is even worse, since she began serving only in September.
Fuentes and Hamilton share more than just a bad attendance record. In the waning months of 2013, both of them expressed the belief that the Planning Commission could do no independent “planning” per se, but rather, were limited in doing only what the Council instructed them to do. These beliefs, of course, were nonsense, and after I spent some time with the City Clerk researching the issue, turned out to be baseless. It does raise the question, however, as to why people would want to join a “Planning” Commission and then avoid planning. There is, of course, an answer, but that will have to wait for another article.
MOBILE HOME CONVERSIONS (Item #14)
Lake Forest has 4 mobile park homes with 1,236 mobile units which represent 4.5% of the total housing units in the City. The land for 3 of the 4 parks (Kimberly Gardens, Prothero Estates, El Toro Mobile Estates) is owned by the Prothero family and are on land leases that expire between 2025 and 2031. The Prothero family leased this land in the 1970s. Kimberly Gardens is managed by the residents while the other 2 parks are managed by professional corporations. The Protheros claim that once the leases expire they do not plan to close the parks.
The State regulates mobile park homes through the Mobilehome Residency Law (MRL), and this also covers closing parks.
Some residents are worried that the State laws do not provide sufficient protection from owners closing down the parks, so they’ve asked the City to add an additional layer.
Tomorrow we’ll finish up the preview with discussions of proposed changes to business signage, and an attempt to reduce the recurring agenda items to reduce the time it takes to conduct Council meetings. And we’ll finish with a look at the Voigts Void.
