Once again we have a short agenda, which is kinda a bummer when we have a lot going on in the City.

Where is the bus shelter contract (yes, I know it will go to ATC this week, but it’s a bit late)?

What happened to Mayor John Stephens’s suggestion that the city form a housing committee?

What about the City’s erstwhile Economic Development Plan?

What’s going on with Fairview Development Center, which has been in and out of the closed session agendas?

Will we ever get an update on the progress of Brentwood Park, which was supposed to be in design this Fall?

What is happening with the Fairview Park Master Plan?

Will we EVER start thinking about rezoning our Measure K sites?

Will the City Council ever get an update on our Housing Element program progress? Is HCD yelling at us yet?

Speaking of HCD, whatever happened to that scary letter we received about our sober living home ordinances?

Etc., etc. Ah well.

But never fear! There is still some interesting stuff to discuss.

Consent Calendar: Uh, what? We don’t have a DUI enforcement team anymore?

As you know I try to follow along, but the city puts out a lot of information and I’m sure I miss stuff all the time. So maybe everyone else knew this, but I was today-years-old when I learned that the Costa Mesa Police Department (CMPD) does not currently have a full-time impaired driving enforcement team (!). The disclosure comes tucked into a consent calendar item about accepting a new ~$300k grant from the Office of Traffic Safety (a subsidiary of the National Transportation and Highway Safety Administration, a federal agency), which looks like it will fund DUI checkpoints as well as bicycle safety education at local schools.

The Staff Report notes that, once upon a time, the CMPD maintained at least a two-officer task force dedicated to DUI enforcement for almost twenty years, from 1986-2014. Then, “due to Police Department contraction” (ahem, wonder how that could have happened), the unit was disbanded in 2014. Then, in early 2021, the DUI team was reestablished and DUI arrests shot up from 386 in 2020 to a shocking 1,017 in 2021. I noted this scary trend back at the beginning of this year. While really bad behavior during the COVID-19 epidemic likely had something to do with it, it turns out that our interest in enforcement could also be contributing to our big numbers.

But now we’re without a DUI team again. The Staff Report says that the team disbanded in October 2023 once again “due to department contraction”. Unlike the 2014 “contraction,” which was very likely caused by an attempt by a far more conservative City Council to reign in spending and trim our pension burdens, this Fall 2023 contraction is more mysterious. There were no heavy cuts to the police budget and the current City Council has gone out of its way to support and affirm every since police request that has crossed its desk. So what gives? I fear that, once again, we are seeing signs of heavy attrition and poor ability to hire hit our public safety personnel.

Unfortunately it’s unlikely that DUIs will just disappear. As much as I hate to be that person, I think it is absolutely imperative that we reinstate the DUI team in light of the number of cannabis shops we’ve opened recently (including yet another one last week). Not only are we increasing the opportunity to buy intoxicating substances, there is increasing evidence that mixing cannabis with alcohol can produce some undesirable results. And… we just happen to have one of the most vibrant bar scenes in Orange County, a very poor transit network and extremely limited walkability. Guess how everyone is getting home.

And hey, look: we are finally getting some healthy cannabis revenue. I can’t think of a better use for the resulting taxes than to help offset our heightened risk of DUIs.

Here come the bees!

So the City of Costa Mesa has finally gotten around to legalizing backyard beekeeping. I can’t say I’m shocked given that I helped take a stab at a draft ordinance while I was on the Animal Services Committee. However, I did figure it would take longer given that, in general, hobbyism (be it gardening, sourdough bread, fostering animals or, yes keeping bees) had died down a bit since we all resumed our normal lives post-COVID.

But hey, never underestimate the power of extremely involved and influential super residents putting multiple letters-to-the-editor in the local newspaper, especially when that super resident gets a bee-in-her-bonnet after the CMPD serves her with an illegal beekeeping citation. I bet CMPD Chief Ron Lawrence is kicking himself for that one. Now, the CMPD’s Animal Control Unit, recently saddled with responsibility of handling all animal services in the City, has been given the unenviable task of legalizing a practice that, until now, was considered too hazardous to public safety to permit. How’d they do?

Sadly, I have to give them a C. I was happy to see that they did keep some of the language from the draft ordinance submitted by the Beekeeping Subcommittee of the Animal Services Committee. Unfortunately there is no way for the public to know that: the Staff made the curious decision not to make the Beekeeping Subcommittee’s report or its draft ordinance public. But I know, and I was glad some of the Subcommittee’s language made it in.

But the changes they did make… are more than a little nitpicky. For example, to get a beekeeping permit, an applicant now has to not only notify her neighbors she’s going to try it, but get an affirmative signature of consent from each neighbor as well. That’s going to be prohibitively difficult in practice. The CMPD is also asking beekeepers to renew their permits every two years, which doesn’t sound onerous except that doing so requires a site inspection and re-notifying all of your neighbors… again. At some point that will get a bit annoying for everyone around you.

In fact, the beekeeping ordinance is so full of potential failure points for the permit applicant that I wonder if the CMPD is hoping we’ll issue very, very few such permits in practice. It reminds me of the old Charlie Munger saying, “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” Does the CMPD want residential beekeeping to really take off? What incentive do they have for taking on yet another thankless job? Are we paying them more for now becoming beekeeping experts? I didn’t think so.

This is where we desperately need the civilian City Council to step in and clarify what they want to see as representatives of the residents, and to allocate appropriate Staff time and attention to make it happen. And if they don’t want to throw a lot of money at this, here’s my advice: less is more. Make this as simple as possible to administer and see how it goes. They can always come back and tighten the regulations if it leads to problems.

“Eviction prevention” is the new “rental assistance”

The first “New Business” item and the last item on the agenda isn’t particularly interesting unless you read between the lines. Here, the Staff is coming forward asking that the City Council reclassify approximately $300,000 in ARPA funds allocated to provide relief to renters subject to a no-fault eviction such that the funds could instead be used to provide rental assistance to tenants “at risk” of eviction. Seems reasonable enough. Yet it is interesting to dig into why they want to do this.

Apparently we offered up $300k for folks facing the epidemic of no-fault evictions — remember, the ones where landlords purported to do substantial renovations that required the tenant to move out? — and we got basically no takers. Only about $7,000 has been spent to date and helped only four households.

This seems to be for two reasons: first, we simply didn’t have that many documented no-fault evictions (Staff counted only nine of them in the last six months). Maybe the eviction ordinance that we enacted worked as intended and disincentivized landlords from using the “substantial remodel loophole”. Maybe the broader State law protections that came into effect in April with SB 567 did the trick. Maybe all this regulation has driven the eviction pressure elsewhere, and tenants are now being informally evicted in other ways. Or maybe the crisis always had less to do with no-fault evictions and more to do with simple payment defaults. In any event, the qualifying no-fault evictions appear to be few and far between.

The second reason is that some of the tenants that were eligible decided to refuse the help. The Staff Report doesn’t say the reason for such refusals, and I think that would be an interesting follow up question for the City Council. It’s odd to turn down free money, unless the tenants feared the money wasn’t really free.

In any event, the bottom line is that we allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars towards a problem that, turns out, isn’t really on that scale. So why not allocate the funds to tenants “at high risk of eviction”? I could be wrong, but reading between the lines, that seems to mean tenants that are chronically behind on their rent. For example, one of our contractors estimates that, with $109,500, it expects to help 5-10 households. Now, I’m just a lawyer, but even if you back out about $15,000 of these funds for administrative costs, that comes out to $9,400-18,900 per household. While the Staff Report says that assistance to any one household will be capped at $10,000, It seems like most of the households being assisted very well may hit that cap. Needing thousands of dollars of assistance to catch up suggests being several months behind.

But is helping these tenants a bad thing? For a one-time pot of money like ARPA funds, all of which have been allocated and won’t be coming back any time soon (hopefully), maybe not — the proposal targets low income families, which seems sensible and inline with the ARPA-funded rental assistance the city’s been distributing for the last several years. But I am a bit concerned that rebranding such “rental assistance”, which so far has described a one-time relief effort to soften the blow of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdowns, as “eviction prevention” could be a prelude to maintaining such a program in perpetuity. I’ve cautioned before that, once you add new staff to a department, they are going to be constantly looking for things they can do. And allowing the city to mission-creep into supporting low-income housing assistance out of the general fund seems like a bad idea. There is no bottom to that bucket.