Right off the bat I have to say something nice about City Staff — for two City Council meetings in a row, they’ve managed to publish the agendas on the Thursday before the meeting rather than Friday afternoon. Now granted there were huge lead times for both meetings thanks to not one, but two summer breaks (🤨), but I hope that this is a trend that will continue into the Fall. Having an extra 24 hours to look over the agenda, especially when the City Council is considering meaty items, is very helpful.

And this one is full of red meat. So buckle up for a lot of reading.

Even I’m tired of the inclusionary housing ordinance (IHO)

The IHO is back again for hopefully it’s last-second-reading. Honestly I’m really out of effs to give on this ordinance. After Council Member Arlis Reynolds decided to look again at her own applicability threshold of 50 units on the reasoning that this threshold would cause the IHO to only cover 47% of the Measure K sites, it turns out this doesn’t really matter very much. The sites are so lopsidedly weighted towards a few very large sites that 47% of the sites covers a whopping 91% of the units anticipated to be built under Measure K.

This has two implications. First, it means that this entire delay is about whether the IHO will apply to Measure K sites that can accommodate, on average, 30 units of housing or less. If IHO-skeptics like myself are correct that imposing an IHO on such developments will depress or eliminate production on these smaller sites, then all changing the threshold will accomplish is to ensure that the only development Costa Mesa sees in the next 5-10 years are huge, community changing builds like One Metro West or Hive Alive. The smaller, more incremental developments that may be very dense but do not add tons of units to one place may simply not happen at all.

And second, it means that even if we are wrong and complying with the IHO is a negligible cost for these developments, we’d net about, at most, 119 deed restricted affordable units by changing the applicability threshold from 50 units to 30 units. That’s it. So the proposal is, in sum, to risk not adding almost 1,200 units to the market in the most gentle, unoffensive way possible in favor of rolling the dice for, at most, 119 lottery tickets. Assuming the developers of those smaller lots don’t choose to pay the in-lieu fee instead, which they most likely would.

You know, with reasoning like that, it’s a total mystery how a state like California gets into these housing crises in the first place.

The discussion will also finally address the in-lieu fee schedule, and Staff does its darnedest to convince everyone that $19.50 per square foot is totally reasonable. Honestly, since the rational option of not twisting ourselves into this regulatory pretzel in the first place isn’t available with this Council, the members just need decide what the point of the IHO is. If the point is to get a for-profit developer to shoehorn a few lucky recipients of affordable units into their massive luxury developments, then screw it — we should double the in-lieu fee, or even eliminate the option of paying it above some threshold. Maybe we just throw darts at balloons labeled 80, 100 and 120 units to decide in a careful and scientific manner.

But if the point is to generate sufficient cash to subsidize nonprofit developers to build whole communities that are deed-restricted affordable and that target vulnerable populations like the very poor, families with children, or seniors, then actually making money with the in-lieu fees becomes important. So important I would suggest phasing in the in-lieu fee over time to encourage developments to get in the door right away. Every minute of delay degrades the purchasing power of those future fees, so there’s no time to waste.

Pursuing either goal half way, or trying to pursue both goals at the same time, is very likely to fail. So I’m going to guess that’s just what this Council will end up doing. I’m so over this.

City Council to vote on their own pay raise

In one of the biggest WTF agenda items I’ve seen in a while, the City Manager, in an election year, has decided that this is the moment to bring forward an item to catch up City Council members’ salaries to present dollars, as they haven’t been touched since 2009. So why now? Turns out the City Council asked for a market report on City Council compensation… three years ago, in September 2021, and the City Manager thought now would be the time to finally address that request. What?

Sorry that makes no sense. Is this just so that the incumbents facing re-election this Fall can make a show of selflessly declining to raise their own salaries? The analysis in the Agenda Report is so light — basically, arguing that (1) we have to pay the City Council more to encourage good candidates to run (what?) and (2) Huntington Beach (a city with almost 2x the population of Costa Mesa) and Newport Beach (a city with more than 2x the budget of Costa Mesa) pay their City Council more so, uh, we should too — and the timing so odd it’s hard to not be cynical.

Which is sad, because I actually think paying elected officials fair compensation is a great thing to do. It helps to ensure the job is open even to candidates of modest means, and it helps to blunt (though of course, could never eliminate) the incentive to supplement income by exploiting one’s position. This is just a hamfisted way to do it.

It is also a great opportunity to point out how silly this state is. The Agenda Report notes that the State law permits City Council salaries to be increased by a maximum of 5% per year since the last year of adjustment, but that no ordinance may automatically increase such salaries by such amount. So instead of doing the rational, apolitical thing of, say, setting salaries to automatically adjust every year with inflation, we either have to waste time on this item every year or settle for big, lumpy jumps like we’re considering now. Stupid.

Clever accounting (and straight appropriations) for CMPD staffing

Another eyebrow raising item is the Costa Mesa Police Department’s (CMPD) proposal to shuffle around staffing and add a few more positions… even though we just reviewed the budget two months ago. The issue can be boiled down fairly simply: we have 16 police officer vacancies and 7 CMPD communications officer vacancies, and we need to throw more money at the problem to fill them. Someone must be nervous about the cracks in public safety services starting to show, because these are some, uh, creative proposals:

• Covert police recruits from part-time pay to full-time pay… without full time service. Police recruits only work part-time because they are spending half their time at the police academy learning to be police officers. Apparently we need to pay these folks more to keep attracting good recruits. So the solution is… pretend they’re actually full time police officers and pay them accordingly! Even though they are not! The Agenda Report states that there is no fiscal impact to this maneuver because it comes out of the money budgeted for full-time police officer vacancies. Uh, sorry, a part-time untrained police cadet =/= a full time police officer.
• Add 10 part-time police cadets. Unlike the creative accounting used above to avoid budgetary impacts, this request will (probably) require a new $211,000 allotment from the City’s General Fund to hire ten part-time police “cadets” — i.e., CMPD officers that aren’t sworn and that can do non-safety work like parking control. By hiring non-sworn officers on a part-time basis, the City can avoid taking on the big pension and Police Union representation obligations that come with sworn officers. I’m not against this approach per se, but why didn’t this come up in June? The Agenda Report further claims that this spend will be mitigated by using these cadets for special events with third-party sponsors, such that the sponsors will reimburse the city for their services at such events. That may be true, but that also means that the City will not be incentivized to use the cadets’ time to cover more mundane and typical tasks, such as parking tickets and park citations. So it seems to me this approach won’t materially improve everyday policing.
• Add 5 part-time reserve police officers. Reserve police officers are essentially officers that have private sector jobs but moonlight for the CMPD on a flexible basis, such as to cover a police officer’s vacation or to work special events. City Council will also consider a proposal to raise the pay for these officers by about 12% (though admittedly the pay rate hadn’t been touched since 2014, so, this raise is likely overdue). The Agenda Report quietly notes that we have “a number” of former CMPD officers in the city that left their roles for private sector jobs that would be interested in serving as a reserve officer. Seems like poaching from other cities isn’t the only way we are losing personnel; we may be competing with private sector jobs as well.

In summary: it’s hard to escape the conclusion that we’re trying to plug full-time holes with part-time patches. Patches that allow the City’s public safety apparatus to continue along as it has without requiring the City to come to grips with the actual cost of policing. Which, it turns out, is really, really high.

The first Measure K housing development that doesn’t rhyme with Fun Retro Vest

We have one! We finally have one! And… it’s a super bland, luxury townhouse condo development project with too much parking located on Costa Mesa’s worst-designed intersection and emptying out onto its very worst street! SCORE!

But seriously, a big round of applause for the proponents of Measure Y, without whom this ridiculous proposal wouldn’t have been possible. If it weren’t for their incredibly rash decision to ride the wave of anti-Righeimer frustration into a poison-pill ballot measure that outlawed sensible, residential development in sensible, residential-zoned places, and if they hadn’t made the only politically available way to unwind said poison pill was a ballot measure to put now desperately needed housing in silly places like next to a Jiffy Lube, then we’d never get contorted plans like this one. One that proposes to trade going-concern commercial businesses generating sales and property tax for the one-time sugar high of stepping up the property tax basis on wealthy newcomers.

But at least it’s ownership housing, am I right? It even has a dash of ground-floor retail in the City’s least walkable place.

And finally, the Chamber of Commerce comes to the City Council hat-in-hand, about two years too late

Tucked almost all the way to the back of the agenda — caboosed only by the proposed updates to Shalimar Park which, assuming the possible land-buy next door isn’t going to affect it, should be a pleasant discussion — is another bizarre item. The Chamber of Commerce is asking for American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to reimburse it for its losses during COVID, primarily due to forgone membership dues and loss of business partners and members through attrition. Fair enough: COVID was miserable for our local businesses and I’m not surprised at all that the Chamber of Commerce took a big hit, too. Except… it’s 2024 friends, and the ARPA money is all gone.

So what financial disaster has brought the Chamber to City Hall now? Well, they say, they incurred substantial losses in 2020 and 2021. I’m sure they did: but what happened in 2022, 2023, and 2024 year to date? Has the Chamber’s revenues recovered? If they’ve been in distress, why didn’t they ask for these funds earlier?

And while it’s not a ton of money — about $124,000 — it’s kinda offensive for the Chamber to come now, long after the ARPA money is gone, and ask to use the City’s discretionary money to plug budget holes without evidence that they are in current financial distress. You know what else suffered horribly during the pandemic and has yet to fully recover? Our public parks, many of which had facilities closed or improvements deferred only to continually get backburnered while the City pursues glitzy grant-funded projects. Honestly I’m sure I could find all kinds of programs and projects that were neglected or just forgotten about during the pandemic that haven’t been restored, and that could use a spare $125,000 we seem to just have lying around for such purposes.

It makes you wonder what the heck is going on with this city sometimes.