It’s not April Fool’s Day, so I assume that the notice on the City’s website that the Parks and Recreation Commission (PRC) is taking a “vacation day” tonight is not a joke. Maybe they caught the “cancellation disease” from the Planning Commission, who cancel 20%+ of their meetings. Or maybe they’re just bored. After all, they have a very active recreation program that seems to work well, and the Sports Park is on schedule to open up in the Fall. So what else is there to do?
Glad you asked!
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DOG PARK
Last year the PRC spent several months and were unable to come up with a viable location for a dog park when they limited their search to existing Lake Forest city parks. So they threw up their hands, put their collective tail between their legs, and sent the unfilled request back to the City Council. In the nearly six months since then not a whiff of their report has surfaced at the City Council. I think the saying is that “bad news travels fast”, but in this case, the bad news seems to be taking forever to go from the desk of Gary Magill (Recreation Director) to the desk of Bob Dunek (City Manager), which is only a few hundred feet away, to the City Council.
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The abortive search for a dog park location restricted itself to only city parks. There were many many more options to choose from (e.g., county parks, unused county land, unused city land, private land, Cal Trans land, etc.) but the PRC never considered any of these options. They just shut the book when their limited search turned up empty. BTW – in the process they did find a perfectly suitable location in a City park (Borrego), but they couldn’t agree totally and were unwilling to do a little more work.
In the 6 months that the bad news has lingered on Magill or Dunek’s desk the PRC could have easily re-opened the search and found a viable location. Indeed, the mandate from the City Council was not to find a location in a city park, but to find a location! Nobody cares whether or not it’s on county land, or located inside the new home communities, on Cal Trans land, or whatever. Just get it done!
VILLAGE POND PARK
Village Pond Park (VPP) has been a mess for years, but for years the City has ignored the Park while spending millions of dollars upgrading parks in other areas of the City. (The word on the street is that this was a deliberate strategy by the City to make the Park such a foul place that people would ask the City to eliminate the Pond, which is the source of the water fowl who are responsible for fouling the park. It seems that the City is uncomfortable trying to manage a Pond and would prefer not to have this responsibility). Finally, the City Council took $30,000 and hired a consultant to draw up a plan to deal with the problem (As if to confirm the word on the street, the consultant continually tried to pitch an option of closing down the Pond, even though there was nearly universal opposition to closing it down).
The consultants held two workshops, then faked a third workshop, in the process of which the Brown Act was violated. All of this has been reported before. Late last year, the PRC took a woefully inadequate draft of a purported final report, called it “excellent”, and approved sending it to the City Council. Apparently that inadequate report got lost in the 100 feet between Magill’s desk and Dunek’s office, which now should probably be called “The City Gulch” since so many things seem to get lost there lately. Quite frankly I have no idea what happened, except to observe that (as with the dog park) the report has yet to surface at the City Council.
I’m pretty sure that even this City Council would not approve such a bad report, and I’m told privately by sources I can‘t name, that my assessment of the inadequacy of the report is shared by many, including some on the PRC itself.
In fact, the report and the process itself appears to have violated the terms of the contract between the City and the consultant, so the PRC should still be working on making the report more responsive. After all, a report on how to handle the problem of the over population of water fowl in VPP that contains no recommendations about how to deal with the bird problem, seems like a strange report indeed.
WHY THE BREAK?
This brings us back to the original question. Why is the PRC taking a break when there is so much work left to do on issues that are important to thousands of people who live in the City? We have 9,000 registered dog owners who don‘t have access to a dog park. We have hundreds of people who visit the Village Pond Park daily, and probably hundreds more who would if they didn’t have to walk through yards of feces to get there. With such important work in front of them, is this the time for a group that only meets once per month to take a day off?
