Council Preview June 18. Part 2 - Closed Session

In Part 1 we discussed some of the open agenda items for the June 18 meeting of the City Council. But the real action is in the Closed Session.

Behind closed doors, the council will consider “Public Employee Performance Evaluation” which is not further described. I can only assume this refers to the annual evaluation of our City Manager which is due now. They will also discuss the case of Nick vs. City of Lake Forest, a lawsuit that has been thoroughly covered in The Patch. Click here for more information.

NICK VS. CITY OF LAKE FOREST

 As far as I know there isn’t much new to report about Nick’s lawsuit, but there was an interesting development. One of the issues raised by Nick in his lawsuit was that City staff approved allowing a new store to sell alcohol in an area that was already over-saturated with alcohol-selling stores, including his own. Staff did this without apparently referencing the Planning Commission or opening up the process to public scrutiny.

 In his letter of January 14, 2011,  Nick wrote, “…The power to issue a PCN or decline to issue one must not be vested to any one official, especially when the one individual has full discretionary power; It must be vested to our Elected Officials…or, at a minimum, to a governing body (committee), rather than to one individual, qualified or otherwise, impartial or otherwise, and certainly with due notice to and input from the very Lake Forest residents the PCN is going to affect.”

Lo and behold, recently there were similar circumstances in a case in Foothill Ranch, and this time, instead of making the decision staff referred it to the Planning Commission. You can read about that topic by clicking here.

Interestingly enough, the staff recommended approving adding alcohol sales to an area 300% over-saturated, but the Planning Commission wisely voted unanimously to deny the request.

The bottom line was that the staff have changed their evil ways, and it met with the approval of an least one of the Commissioners (Brower) who recommended that the City formally adopt this policy of not allowing staff to make decisions on these types of matters (Perhaps, if our City Manager and our senior staff lived in Lake Forest, as do our Commissioners, they would have cared more about the make-up of our town and would not have been so accommodating to booze, or gambling for that matter).  .

Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit, Nick’s claim, at least in this regard, seems to be vindicated.

(Note to Commissioner Brower – Rather than merely recommend this process in your comments, perhaps you should offer this as a formal agenda item for the Commission, who could vote on the issue and then pass it on to the Council who could adopt it.)

BTW – I have been researching Nick’s lawsuit and the use of the PCN and this will be a topic for a later extensive article on the subject.

CITY MANAGER PERFORMANCE

The City Manager is hired by the Council and has a one year contract, up for review right now. Let’s help the Council and do a little review of our own –

·   Public safety – compared to our neighbors we have (a) higher crime, (b) lower crime solving, and (c) higher per capita costs. 

·   Traffic – everyone knows traffic is terrible and we’ve just approved adding 4,000+ new homes and 30,000+ new vehicle trips every day to our city. 

·   Resources – we have no senior center and no local animal shelter, which most of our neighbors have. For nearly 20 years we’ve had no city hall, no dog parks, and not enough sport fields, and though these are on the table for future developments, you can’t ignore the fact that for many years our neighbors have had these facilities and we haven’t.  

·   Appearance – many places in the city look really bad – e.g., paint on walls is peeling, city landscape looks barren in many places, streets are dirty, etc. A city with our annual budget should look better.

·   Legal Issues – the City’s policy of “now you see it, now you don’t” is just plain ridiculous. We vote in an ordinance about day laborers and then we kick it out. We vote to ban sex offenders and then we remove it. Not only are people confused, we waste a lot of time and energy, and even worse, a lot of money. We spend more than $1,000,000 per year for legal expenses, which is the highest percent of budget among any of our neighboring cities.

·   Reports – almost every report from the City looks like it was done by a sophomore in college. They often cite facts that are not correct and have flaws in the logic. They almost never ask for any performance objectives, and rarely provide data about how effective our efforts are. For example, staff recently recommended that we approve adding another store selling alcohol to an area of the city with more than 3 times the recommended stores in that area. They did this without any consideration of the fact that Lake Forest leads all of our neighbors in DUI arrests and arrests for alcohol law violations.

·   Recent revelations – in the past few months, independent agencies have ranked our city along with our neighbors and we’ve come in last with regard to our transparency (Grand Jury) and our recycling efforts (ecoNomics).

Not an impressive record for someone who has a base salary of $240,656 without counting his auto allowance ($7044), cell phone allowance ($1200), health, dental, vision, life and disability insurance, bonus, payment for professional dues, subscriptions, and travel expenses, and retirement benefits.

But let’s be fair and look at some of the positive things –

·   Finances – we have a lot of money in the bank and can afford to fund most of the items in our capital improvement program (of course, one reason we have so much in the bank is that we haven’t been spending it on services for residents, as noted above. Still, at least we didn’t throw it away).

·   Spirit – a lot of people are really happy and have a good feeling about the City (unless they live in Foothill Ranch or Portola Hills) and we have lots of people who volunteer to help the city.

·   Crime – as the City likes to point out, we have less crime than downtown Detroit, and the truth is, even though we are worse than most of our neighbors, on a national scale we are doing OK. OK isn’t anything to brag about, but at least it’s OK.

·   Pockets of Excellence – like the 4th of July Parade, or Ethnies Skatepark.

·   Impressive Leisure Program – Our Parks and Recreation Department does a great job and puts out an impressive number of events and classes that are well attended.

Lately, the City has been doing much more.

·   We are trying to be more business friendly (although we still are spending less than 5% of our budget in Lake Forest)

·   Our website shows that we are becoming more transparent.

·   Our Planning Commission is busy overhauling the admittedly outdated parking standards for commercial and residential.

That’s good and this is movement in the right direction. Yet one has to ask, what took us so long to get around to these positive trends.

If I had to give the City Manager a grade, it would be C. That means “needs improvement.” He could certainly do a worse job (look at Bell), but there are so many things that our neighbors enjoy which we don’t, one has to wonder what he’s been up to.

BTW – If you are interested, the City Manager’s compensation and contract are available on the City’s website. Ironically, there isn’t a single thing in his contract that obligates him to achieve a single performance objective.

The bottom line is that there is nothing scandalous going on, but for a person whose annual compensation exceeds $300,000, doing a “fair” or “adequate” job is hardly cause for joy. Last year the City Council voted to give the Manager a raise. It’s a new City Council now and one where the new members pride themselves on being “cost conscious” and “business savvy”. Let’s see what they do.