… So basically, I get the weekend off. Woo hoo!

If you want to do the assigned reading for what is likely to be one of the most painful City Council meetings evah, feel free to have at it. The sole public hearing item will be Staff’s latest and greatest stab at putting together a new cannabis ordinance. So for those of you who want to participate in that, I say: I’m sorry, and good luck.

Thankfully other things ARE happening in this agenda, even if you have to comb through a bit to find them:

• Don Harper is still listed as the representative for District 1, despite announcing his to resign just about a month ago. I assume he’ll be taken off the masthead as soon as he sends his letter of resignation to the City Clerk, so obviously that hasn’t happened yet.
• Adams Avenue from the Santa Ana River to Royal Palm Drive will get a much needed rehabilitation project approved via the consent calendar. I drive Adams every day so I personally very much appreciate the city giving this stretch some TLC. While there are mentions of Class II bike lanes and high visibility crosswalks being incorporated into this project, this is not related to the much more ambitious project the City just got partially funded through OCTA. That will be a project sometime down the road (read: years) that will substantially reconfigure this stretch to include a fully separate Class I multiuse path. But man, it will be glorious when it is finished.
• The city is also looking to re-up and expand its lease of Flock “automated license place reader” (ALPR) cameras, which were first installed around the Mesa Verde area around this time last year. Since then the ALPR cameras have proven very effective in nabbing car thieves and other criminals, as noted in the Agenda Report. I have minor quibbles with the pricing on this item (first, if each camera is rented to the City at a flat per annum rate, then the cost disclosed by the Staff is the cost per year, not the total three-year impact, which would be (obviously) three times higher; and second, if we’re paying for the additional cameras out of grant money, how does Staff propose we pay for them when the grant money runs out?) but it seems like it is likely to otherwise sail through the approval process.
• Buried deep, deep in the consent calendar item regarding the expansion of senior transportation services is the news that the city has managed to almost double ridership in this point-to-point senior transit service from 650 riders per month to almost 1,100 riders per month (!), which is pretty remarkable if you ask me. Clearly, the demand for better funded public transportation is there.

That’s all for now!