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Health & Fitness

Is the Planning Commission Planning?

While the newly appointed Planning Commission takes a holiday, Lake Forest is threatened with a growing traffic problem.

No sooner had the Tea Party Troika (Voigts, Robinson and Nick) got themselves comfortably placed in the seats of power, they surgically removed two experienced and well regarded Planning Commissioners and replaced them with two of their own, one of whom had no apparent qualifications for the position other than the fact that he helped elect Mayor Voigts, which, all things considered, should have been a dis-qualification, if anything. Barely on the job a few weeks, the newly constituted Planning Commission declared a holiday and took the day off, cancelling the March 14 meeting.

If you go to the City’s website you won’t easily find the Planning Commission. It’s hidden away, listed under “Planning Division” inside the sub-menu for Development Services. To find it you’ve got to do some digging, so here’s the direct link:

http://www.lakeforestca.gov/depts/ds/planning/planning_commission_/default.asp

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Now there’s nothing on that page that tells us what they do. Indeed, the City’s website still lists Terry Anderson and Dave Carter as members of the commission, so maybe all this time the City is putting into archiving their decade's old agreements would be better spent keeping the current activities up to date. But I digress.

Because the city doesn’t tell us what the Planning Commission does, we can only assume that they do planning. I’ve been to several of their meetings and I can attest to that fact. And if you read the minutes of the meetings that they don’t cancel, you’ll see that they take this task very seriously.

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So here we are in 2013 and for more than a decade the #1 problem identified by the citizens has been traffic. And right now, as if traffic wasn’t bad enough, the City has approved more than 4,000 new homes, 12,000 new people, and 20,000 new cars, vans, and trucks that will be jammed into our streets any day now. I’ve spoken about this traffic tsunami several times so I don’t need to repeat myself here.

What I find incredulous is that in the face of the impending traffic tsunami, and with developers banging on our doors for even more homes, and with no effective traffic mediation plan on the horizon, the Planning Commission takes a holiday. Must they wait until the streets are no longer passable before it shows up on the Planning Commission agenda?

This brings me to the idea of the Traffic Commission. Almost everyone who ran in the last election thought this was a good idea, and the two guys who won endorsed it. Well, we’re five months past the election and there’s been no progress in this area. I know the City Council has a full agenda (no holidays for those folks). And I know that Councilman Nick has been busy with the transparency issue (thank you) and Councilman Robinson has been active with the dog park issue (thank you), and Mayor Voigts has spent an enormous amount of staff and council time (and attorney money) on his desire to get prayers into our council meetings—but of all the issues facing the City, I would think that getting the traffic commission off the ground would get one of the highest priorities.

Bottom line: let's get going with the Traffic Commission so the Planning Commission can take a holiday without having to feel guilty.

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