The upcoming City Council meeting for Tuesday night, June 4, may be a little dull, but here’s what’s on tap.
FIVE YEAR PLAN REVIEW
The 5-year plan comes back to the Council once again, and once again it fails to deal with some major issues in the City. Indeed, there have been several discussions at the Council in the past few months that indicate that what is reflected in the 5-year plan are the hopes and dreams of the old council, reflecting a nearly decade’s old look at the world and the city. Unfortunately, the staff and the council made the decision to tweak the old plan, rather than construct a new plan that represents the new council and the new reality of life in Lake Forest in 2013. In a previous article I urged the Council to go to the extra effort of a new strategic planning session, and since no one has picked up the baton, at the risk of droning on, I urge it once again.
PAPERLESS AGENDA
Every year the city of Lake Forest uses thousands of dollars of paper to print copies of agendas for the Council and Commissions. More than half the cities in California use paperless agendas, so our City now proposes to join them and save a few trees and a few thousand dollars. Bravo. Unfortunately City staff seem to think that the only way you can access the Internet is via iPads, so they’ve combined the idea of a paperless agenda with purchasing iPads for the Council.
Duh.
By all means let’s go to paperless agendas, but there’s no need to spend money equipping Council and Commission members with expensive iPads. I hope that the city council members who campaigned on “fiscal responsibility” remember their pledges.
LOBBYING AND SOLICITING GRANTS
At the request of Mayor Voigts, the Council is going to step up its activities in lobbying and in soliciting grants. The job descriptions are -
LOBBYING: assist the City with respect to tracking and sponsoring legislation, supporting or opposing legislation, or seeking City-sponsored amendments to pending legislation.
SOLICITING GRANTS: provide a Funding Needs Analysis to assess the validity of current funding priorities, identify changes in funding priority areas, and identify new priority areas for funding. In addition, conduct research to identify grant resources including, but not limited to, federal, state, foundation, agencies, and organizations. Payment is 5% of grant money received or $10,000 per grant, whichever is less.
If you think you can provide these services, proposals are due by June 18. Let's keep Lake Forest money in Lake Forest.
BTW – we’ve had a lobbying effort going on for years, and it’s not really clear how effective the program has been. Yet the Council wants to expand the program and throw more money in that direction. On the face of it, it seems logical, yet in the absence of any data, we just might be wasting money on a program that doesn’t work. It would be better if the Council did a study of the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of our lobbying efforts before they spend more money.
This is another of the all too often examples of the City spending money without proper evaluation. The city funds the Chamber of Commerce to conduct seminars, workshops, and events, but rarely looks at the impact of those efforts. We fund housing assistance but never look at the long term impact of the program. We run Neighborhood Watch programs but fail to evaluate their impact on crime in the target areas. Etc. Many of the people who now sit on the City Council campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility, but these same people routinely rubber stamp spending money without accountability.
For whatever the reason, our staff reports continually fail to use "management by objectives" (MBO) or "key performance indicators" (KPI) or any of the other empirical methods that have made myriad businesses so successful. This places the burden on the Council to make decisions in the absence of real data on how well programs are performing. Of course, MBO and KPI can't be used in every circumstance, but they can be used in many cases, but in our city they are rarely employed and almost never used in the decision making process. Obviously the staff are comfortable performing at this level, so if anything is going to change, it will require the leadership to come from the Council. We have council members who characterize themselves as "businessmen" and "business savvy", and indeed they may be successful in their own endeavors. It's time they took that same approach to the management of the city
See you Tuesday night
