I’m a bit late to this so I won’t try to dig into the Planning Commission meeting for tonight, though I’m curious to watch this one. There are not one but two matters directly related to commercial parking, which seems to be coming up over and over again. So if you are interested in parking matters, or if you are a fan (or anti-fan) of the two businesses in question, Playa Mesa on E. 17th Street and Westend on W. 19th Street, I recommend tuning in.

City Council Agenda — Two Big Planning Items Loom Large

With apologies to the folks concerned about storm water runoff and the health of our local watersheds, I’m going to skip the item reviewing the storm drain master plan (though that will likely be an educational and potentially contentious discussion). Instead, I think it’s worth drilling down on the other two major planning items on the docket.

Finally, an update on the Housing Element

You might recall that there was a study session planned a few weeks ago that was going to cover this Housing Element update, but it was cancelled just a few days after it was scheduled. If I recall correctly the reason was that there was that one of the key staff members suddenly had a conflict, but now I wonder if onboarding of new Economic and Development Services Director Carrie Tai might have had something to do with that, too.

Whatever the reason, we’re getting the Housing Element update now, and it’s about time. I flipped through the materials and I think the bottom line is that we are pretty behind on some major projects, and I’m not confident we have a coherent plan to get back on track. For example, in the Housing Element deadline summary, I spot nine Housing Element programs that have deadlines in December 2024. Then, if you flip over to the Housing Element program timeline, it isn’t clear that we are expecting to complete any of them in a timely fashion. And that’s setting aside the handful of deadlines we have clearly missed: for example, both Program 3Q (lot consolidation) and Program 2G (safety element update and adoption of environmental justice policies) were due December 2023. I haven’t heard a whisper of them until this City Council meeting, when the Staff is finally bringing forward a contract for starting on the climate action plan. I’ll discuss that more in a moment.

I expect the Staff to be a bit defensive about being this far behind the eight ball. And well they should be. I recognize that there have been a number of high level departures, the most devastating of which was former Economic and Development Services Director Jennifer Le, but we are laughably behind on rezoning at this point. Did anyone expect that we would be through the next election before we even had a study session on beginning the outreach process to rezone the sites listed on Measure K? Even I wasn’t that pessimistic.

Does it matter? I mean, of course it matters: there are many people in Costa Mesa who are buckling under the weight of our outrageous housing inflation, and for them, pushing new supply off for two years is devastating. But does it legally matter? At the moment, it’s not clear. HCD seems more focused on beating up on Huntington Beach than doing basic compliance with the Housing Element deadlines. And in any event, we remain subject to the Builder’s Remedy anyway, so it’s not like going slow will make that worse than it already is.

I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop from this frightening letter regarding our sober living group homes that we received from HCD last Fall. But the City remains eerily mum about it, and the Agenda Report doesn’t breathe a word about our sober living homes. Do any of the City Council members dare to bring it up, just a month before the election? I wouldn’t count on it.

Yet another Project Homekey site?

Here’s one other little tidbit to keep an eye on. If you’ve been following city business the last couple of years, the developments listed in the Agenda Report will sound familiar to you: One Metro West, Hive Live, the Project Homekey motel rehabs, 3150 Bear Street (former Trinity Broadcasting Network site) all are listed. But here’s one I haven’t heard about in several years: 2205 Harbor Boulevard is in entitlement review for 46 very low income units. What is that project?

2205 Harbor Boulevard is currently the location of the Mesa Motel, previously the New Harbor Inn. The New Harbor Hotel racked up the same kind of glamorous headlines that other rundown motels had garnered in the city, including the kidnapping, beating and torture of a man connected to both drug trafficking and gang activity back in 2018. It became so bad, in fact, that the city declared it a public nuisance (though, if you recall, this was back during the time when the Costa Mesa City Council was cracking down hard on these motels, as I’ve written about elsewhere). It sure looks like yet another Project Homekey site is on its way in Costa Mesa.

But where is the money coming from? And will the City be asked to make yet another contribution to make the project pencil out? If you recall, the City chipped in millions of dollars to provide gap funding to the Motel 6 conversion on Newport Boulevard and the Travelodge conversion on Bristol Street. But the local matching funds both came out of our allocation of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, which now have been completely spent. Back in 2021, the City was ready to allocate $3.5 million across both the Motel 6 project and this project. $2 million of those funds were ultimately contributed to the Motel 6 conversion. Do we still have that $1.5 million sitting in a fund somewhere? Or, if it is long gone, are we going to have to fund the difference from some other source? [10/18/2024 ed.: Just kidding, we allocated all $3.5 million to the Motel 6 project. So if this 2205 Harbor Blvd. project needs more money, we’ll need to find it elsewhere.]

The City is hiring a consultant to put together a Climate Action Plan. And?

Yet again, the City is going outside City Hall to staff up on a major planning project, and yet again, the work product looks like make-work to check boxes for state grant funding. And before you leap down my throat for not taking climate change sufficiently seriously, I felt exactly the same way about the Pedestrian Master Plan despite street safety being near and dear to my heart. The PMP is basically a worthless document other than its utility as a grant generator.

Unfortunately, the way California government finance works, we, as California taxpayers, send an enormous amount of money to Sacramento rather than to our local governments. In turn, our cities can try and claw some of that money back, but only if they pay the appropriate ransom by showing adequate fealty to the State’s priorities.

In this case, the tribute demanded is to pay a consultant $400,000 to create a thick stack of paper. That stack of paper will then help us fill out our grant applications for a number of pots of money available to help fight climate change. Remember, in California, spending money is the relevant metric of success, not actual results. So much so that we aren’t even required to spend all our own money on this: we’re getting a $50,000 grant from SoCal Edison to help defray the costs.

So as goofy as it is, doing a climate action plan is a no-brainer. In fact, I would say that the city has a fiduciary duty to its taxpayers to put one in place, if only to ensure that the city is eligible to access all of the grants that might be available to it. It’s a bad system, but it’s the system we got.

When I die, I hope I am reincarnated as a California municipal consultant firm partner. It must be nice to have hundreds of clients that are forced to hire you, year after year, to just do paperwork.

Parting shot: has anyone checked on the City Manager’s contingency funds lately?

As I am a bit of a finance nerd, I like to keep track of City spending. So has anyone else noticed that a lot of stop-gap funding in the past couple of months has come out of the City Manager’s contingency fund? First, we had the item a few months ago that provided $319,000 of additional incentive payments to police officers, which was at least partially funded by the City Manager’s contingency fund. Then we had the proposed (but potentially retracted) request from the Chamber of Commerce to sport it about $124,000 for extremely belated COVID-19 relief funding. And now the climate action plan is also dipping into the City Manager’s contingency fund to provide up to $150,000 in gap funding between what is available under the capital improvement budget and what the SoCal Edison grant will cover.

If you look back at the City’s budget, the City Manager’s contingency fund is only $500,000. And as you can see, it is often called upon to provide gap funding here and there for various projects, some of which are important (and, in the case of the Chamber of Commerce proposal, less important). It would probably be prudent to ask City Manager Lori Ann Farrell Harrison if we’re getting close to exhausting her contingency funds, because we haven’t even gotten to the mid-year budget update. Is it wise to spend those funds so early? Or is it a sign we aren’t budgeting appropriately in our higher cost environment?

I get that everything is more expensive. But we should be planning for it to be more expensive. Are we?