On its face, we have a light City Council agenda. But there’s more here than meets the eye.

But before we dive into that, there are three items above the New Business line worth touching on briefly(ish):

FDC land negotiations in the Closed Session?

First, the Closed Session item involves a real property price and terms of payment negotiation involving… the State of California and Fairview Development Center? What could that mean?

The FDC “visioning” process held a fourth workshop over the Summer covering various land use alternatives. I haven’t bothered to discuss those yet because I figured the Planning Commission would be reviewing those alternatives this Fall.

Now I’m wondering if that is going to happen. Its been slowly dawning on all of us that the FDC site has two critical weaknesses: first, that the site is profoundly isolated from the City’s main roads; and second, that the existing infrastructure cannot be reused in any way. Think nonconforming and outdated sewer and water lines, a self-contained electricity grid, lead and asbestos in the walls, etc. With all of these issues, it is entirely possible that the site has negative land value, since it would cost the developer millions just to demo, excavate and remediate in order to get a clean slate for new development.

This gives me a few of ideas about this confidential negotiation. Could it be…

• … A land swap with the Costa Mesa Golf Course, to bring the development site adjacent to Harbor Boulevard? That could certainly help solve the access issues. But then the golf course would have to be radically reconfigured and the City would have to take on the work of restoring the FDC land subject to the swap.
• … Buying the FDC property outright? That would be great if we were going to turn it into a beautiful central park (something even this housing advocate favors) but that idea sounds like a financial boondoggle. Where we would get the money? And if there are serious remediation issues, how do we pay for that?
• … Buying out the State to get the land earmarked for the Emergency Operations Center back in the FDC site? I hope not. That would be the biggest rope-a-dope of all time, since the State would be manufacturing value out of its own threat to put a (arguably incompatible) land use right in the middle of the site.

I’m sure we’ll find out. Eventually.

E-bike report delivers a big nothing-burger

Despite my initial excitement, the City’s response to the Orange County Grand Jury e-bike report turned out to be a pretty underwhelming two-pager. But maybe that’s a good thing: Costa Mesa is way out in front of its neighbors, including Orange County itself, when it comes to addressing bicycle education and infrastructure. If anything, we should be teaching them best practices in this area.

And yes, the Council gets to vote on giving themselves pay raises a second time

I also feel obligated to note that the City Council will bring their salary raises back for a second reading. At this point, the only thing that I find even remotely interesting about this one is whether Mayor Pro Tem Jeff Harlan will stick to his guns and vote against it again, after he did so the first time with no explanation.

Bleh. On to new business.

The City in the Vice, Part I: We’re struggling with staff recruitment and retention

If you look at the increase… in our property tax, you might say well: that’s lovely, right? We get more property taxes. Isn’t that nice we’ve got such great revenue here. But I don’t think we always recognize the relationship between the increase in property taxes, which [reflects] an increase in property values… that’s good if you are a homeowner and good if you are trying to collect [rents], but it does create a lot of costs, and a lot of pain. Let’s face it: in our community the costs come in all of these outreach programs, $2.5 million going into an affordable housing fund, the rental relief programs…”

Mayor John Stephens, City Council Meeting, May 14, 2024

Mayor Stephens gave that quote when the City Council was considering the fiscal year 2024-2025 budget. Despite generally good news from Finance Director Carol Molina, the sense of unease at that meeting was palpable. The City Council has to know that other cities around Orange County are struggling financially, to the point that some of them are proposing tax increases. Others still are facing such severe budget crises that they are contemplating cutting beloved public services. Yet here was Costa Mesa’s budget, looking relatively unscathed.

Turns out that feeling of unease was warranted. The City’s capacity to maintain its primary functions is being squeezed out of it by the spiraling cost of living, strangling it like a slow and implacable vice. And the two new business items this week show how this is happening.

The first New Business item finds the Costa Mesa Police Department coming to the City Council for the second time in two months (recall they asked for this item back in August) for yet more funding to recruit and retain police officers. This time, the Staff is painting a scary picture about our police dispatchers: In 12 years, only nine of the 46 dispatch officers hired are still employed by the city, resulting in an 80%+ turnover rate. Yikes! I assume this means that, not only is the city employing dispatchers with less experience (particularly in our community) than it would otherwise; its current dispatchers are frequently working longer hours to train new recruits or to fill-in for departures.

Now, the Agenda Report says that “the high turnover is a result of employees converting to part-time status or leaving for other local agencies due to the high workload or inability to complete the probationary period due to the rigorous and complex training period.” However, I’m a bit skeptical of these explanations. The actual proposal doesn’t really address employee workload or inefficiencies in the probationary period. Instead, I’m seeing a lot of dollar signs:

• 12.5% bonus pay to current officers who log hours training new recruits
• 7.5% net raise for the Public Safety Dispatch Supervisor base pay
• $15,000 one-time retention bonuses for current dispatch employees ($105,000 total this year)
• Retroactive (back to June 2023) additional 1/2 time pay for overtime logged beyond 60 hours if staffing falls below 18 full time employees

There is also a waiver of the probationary period when employees convert from part-time to full-time, but that seems a bit sleeves-off-the-vest if the city is struggling with employees converting the other direction. Plus, I imagine that probationary period is there for a reason? 🤨

On top of all of that, it turns out we still aren’t doing enough to hire police officers and the aforementioned dispatchers, so the City Council is also going to consider adding hiring bonuses of up to $25,000 each for these positions. Don’t worry, the Agenda Report assures them. This is us being stingy. Other cities are paying upwards of $40,000 to $100,000 per officer.

What in the hell? So why is this happening?

You didn’t think I wrote an entire post about a government labor shortage two days before Christmas last year for my health, did you?

Everything about this item screams that Orange County has a labor-supply problem, particularly in law enforcement, which in turn is being driven by a cost-of-living problem. Police officers only can demand both higher wages and lower training expectations if competition for their services is fierce. And competition can be fierce only if there is some limit on supply. Lowered morale and fewer police cadets graduating the academy might be one explanation, but that doesn’t make sense: Orange County is relatively safe, very beautiful, and has good neighborhoods and schools. Wouldn’t that make it a top choice? I think it does, but the reality is that only so many officers can bear the cost of living within reasonable driving distance to the police station. When normal attrition continues apace but the supply of officers is fixed, competition for their services gets ridiculous. And guess who really pays the cost?

The resident, who gets less service per tax dollar year, after year, after year. Like I wrote back in December, it’s a slow and steady tax on your quality of life.

But it gets worse.

The City in the Vice, Part II: Homelessness is outpacing our efforts to address it

As I will discuss more in a later post, the challengers to the incumbent City Council members facing re-election this Fall are making a big deal out of the observed 43% jump in homeless individuals (up to 297 in 2024 from 208 in 2022) in Costa Mesa logged by the Orange County point-in-time count conducted earlier this year:

Unsurprisingly, as our homeless population increases, our costs to address the problem will as well. Now, Mercy House is now asking for an almost 10% increase in its operating budget to run the Bridge Shelter, and Bracken’s Kitchen is looking for an almost 22% increase in its rate to provide food for the shelter’s guests. These rates were just revisited last Summer when shelter capacity jumped from 85 to 100 guests to accommodate a State grant for additional behavioral health beds.

But do you know what jumps out to me in the table above? The fact that, during the point-in-time count, which was conducted in January 2024, Costa Mesa had 79 homeless individuals in a shelter. The Bridge Shelter is the only shelter in Costa Mesa, and at the time it only had 85 beds. So the point-in-time count confirms: the shelter is basically full.

In fact, it’s full all the time. Last year had an agenda report that noted that it was completely full before its 2023 expansion, and at the time it had a 30-person waiting list. Worse still, this lack of capacity is not just a Costa Mesa problem. Very few cities saw their homeless count drop, and many saw bigger percentage increases than Costa Mesa. So what is happening?

“We believe these results show the amount of people entering homelessness over the past two years is outpacing our homeless services’ ability to get folks out of homelessness and into permanent housing,” said Doug Brecht, director of Orange County’s Office of Care Coordination, stating the obvious at a news conference addressing the results. “It’s a real backlog… We’ve done everything we can to make people fully qualified for housing. We just don’t have the housing to place them.”

And there it is. We just don’t have the housing to place them. The entire point of running a “shelter”, is that people are supposed to stay there temporarily and then, once they find their feet, they’re supposed to get back into real housing. This might be a studio in the private rental market, a friend’s couch, a relative’s spare bedroom, etc. But if we don’t have any available housing at a price that anyone coming off the street can afford, then we are not running a shelter: we are running de facto public housing of last resort.

And thus the vice tightens another turn. Now we aren’t just having to pay city employees more, we’re addressing problems we never imagined we would have even 20 years ago. Problems with no end in sight, and a dependent population that can’t get back on its feet. Operating public housing is expensive. If you think it is bad now, I’m going to guess it will get worse before it gets better.

“No growth” is not sustainable. We’re finding out the hard way.