Well those meetings turned out to be more interesting than I thought. Let’s start with PC.

After the plans for Christ Lutheran Church sailed through the Planning Commission, there was a good and lengthy discussion about the draft Pedestrian Master Plan (PMP). While the commissioners gamely waded into the details — I think Planning Commissioner Chair Adam Ereth peppered staff with questions for at least 20 minutes, and that was before he went line-by-line through the Circulation Element update — there was a clear conflict of visions between the Staff, on the one hand, and the public commenters and the resident-led Active Transportation Committee, on the other, about what this plan was supposed to accomplish.

The residents clearly preferred the plain meaning of the word “plan,” and so there were very disappointed that the PMP lacked crucial specifics such as work plans for particularly troublesome intersections, citywide coverage, or specific implementation timing. Staff seemed to react as if this critique was missing the point. But if the PMP isn’t a “plan”, in that sense, what is it?

“Plans” as point scorers

Thankfully Vice Chair Russell Toler bailed us all out and asked Transportation Services Manager Jennifer Rosales this question directly. “Part of me tends to get a little frustrated some times when we keep doing plans and plans and plans… and part of me thinks, why don’t we spend this energy actually doing … why don’t we stop talking about it and actually do it? […] Why is another plan useful or necessary?” (emphasis mine)

Ms. Rosales then gave a direct, and incredibly refreshing, answer: “One of the main reasons for the [PMP]… is when we apply for grants for actual infrastructure projects, by having a [PMP], having an active transportation plan, having the local road safety plan, by having a lot of plans, we get more points towards those projects. And that helps us secure […] millions of dollars for projects for infrastructure.”

“It’s another tool to get grants,” Public Works Director Raja Sethuraman put even more bluntly.

So there you go. It’s not all that important what the PMP says — though how it influences the General Plan’s Circulation Element likely is, and I’ll go into more detail on that below — rather, what’s important is that the city has it on its shelf, so that when we go out to get grants from OCTA, CalTrans, the U.S. Department of Transportation, etc., we maximize our score by being able to check the box: “has a plan”. In fact, Ms. Rosales implied that more plans check more boxes and score even more points!

And let’s be honest: Staff’s approach has been bringing home the bacon. Active Transportation Coordinator Brett Atencio Thomas’s specialty is grant writing and grant winning, and man, I love him for that. So if we want to have these big, shiny active transportation upgrades and we don’t want to blow up the general fund, we’re going to have to play the state and/or the fed’s games here.

[Sidebar: there is probably an interesting story in here about what I would call the “Municipal-Consultant Complex”, where State and municipal policy strongly incentivizes the use of consultants, who in turn author plans, which in turn are used to get grant funding, which in turn funds more plans by consultants when the original plans have so-so outcomes, and so on. I’m sure this is related to the lack of state capacity generally and dependence on Sacramento funding that seems to dog California municipal government… an issue I suspect has its roots in the state’s funding strategies *cough cough* Proposition 13 *cough cough*. But that is undoubtedly a story for another day.]

But is the only point of the PMP to check a box? No, because adopting a PMP is also an opportunity to crack open the General Plan, which isn’t something we get to do every day. So let’s look at how the PMP will change that.

“Policy” versus “Recommendation” — A distinction nowhere else in the General Plan

I’m guessing most folks are like me and didn’t realize that the adoption of the PMP would be an opportunity to make changes to the City’s General Plan, a fairly vaunted document that usually only gets major revisions every ten years or so. But attached to the agenda for the PMP was a markup of the Circulation Element, which is the part of the General Plan that relates to our streets and roads.

I won’t go line-by-line on all of the changes, but I did want to highlight one thing that came up a few times at the Planning Commission. If you look at Goals C-1 through C-7, you’ll see each Goal is supported by an “Objective”, and that Objective is then buttressed by a number of “Policies”. But when you get to Goals C-7 through C-12 — all of which have to do with active transportation — the Circulation Element starts splitting hairs between Policies and “Recommendations.” There is even a bizarre little note just under the heading for Goal C-7 that attempts to explain this:

The following recommendations are aimed at providing the maximum flexibility in meeting the goals and policies in this Circulation Element.

The note is necessary because the distinction between Policies and Recommendations is bizarre. The distinction is found nowhere else in the General Plan, and certainly nowhere else in the Circulation Element.

So could someone explain to me why active transportation, and only active transportation, must be flexible — and maximally so! — while policies relating to all other modes of transportation may be, by implication, inflexible and non-negotiable? Actually, don’t answer that, because I will. The answer is that prior administrations were afraid that adopting actual policies that supported active transportation would be considered too radical or too granola, without evidence beyond their own preferences and intuitions as far as I can tell, and so they copped out and incorporated the Active Transportation Plan (and now the PMP) into the Circulation Element as second-class policies.

So while I think the changes to the Circulation Element are all good ones, I really wish the City Council would go a lot farther and use this opportunity to just remove this tortured distinction between “Recommendations” and “Policies”. I don’t think it provides flexibility; it just sows confusion and doubt over what the City’s goals actually are, and leaves active transportation to the personal whims of future councils and staffs. Hopefully someone on the City Council will pick up on that, as the PMP passed the Planning Commission generally unchanged.

Finally at City Council – An interesting exchange over personnel budgeting

At the end of what turned out to be a very short and not particularly newsworthy mid-year budget update (and as a member of the Finance and Pension Advisory Committee, I can assure you, non-newsworthiness is a good thing), Mayor John Stephens made an intriguingly pointed request: he requested a roster of all development services personnel, including “background” information (presumably resume type material, such as certifications and education), to supplement his evaluation of the new staffing requests that were included with the mid-year budget update. “I can’t tell you what I think, for what it’s worth, what we need [from a staffing perspective], unless I know what we have. So I really want that,” he commented, while also emphasizing the substantial reforms and programs the city was undertaking with respect to development and housing.

City Manager Lori Ann Farrell Harrison responded at length, and as part of her comments said, “I don’t want to confuse roles as we go through this process. I have ultimate appreciation, Mayor, for what you are requesting — I think it is fair for the Council to want to know what is the appropriate level of staffing for this department in particular […]. What I want to caution us about is that this department has a director […] that is the subject matter expert in the city […].” And if her point wasn’t clear enough, she went on to say:

We don’t typically go into where do people go to school, what kind of experience they have, those are day-to-day operational matters, and so I just want to make sure that we’re not stepping on the toes of our directors or assistant city manager. Clearly myself, that’s my scope, that’s what you hired me to do, that’s my job.

– City Manager Farrell Harrison, City Council Study Session, March 12, 2024

So, in other words, her answer to Mayor Stephens was: no, I will not give you that, and don’t ask again.

But he did ask again after City Manager Farrell Harrison finished her remarks, and then he abruptly adjourned the meeting. Hmmmm.

While I think City Manager Farrell Harrison is right that job qualifications and candidate selection are pretty squarely in the Staff’s domain (at least from a legal perspective), I also think Mayor Stephens is hitting on a fairly fundamental conundrum at the heart of the “council-manager” form of city government: who actually runs the government? In other words, what is the point of asking the City Council to vote on additional personnel hires if the expectation is that they will give total deference to the City Manager (and the other directors) that these personnel hires are good, necessary and affordable, other than to go through the performative motions to maintain the illusion that the City Council “controls the purse strings”?

It’s a great question.