With the election behind it, the City Council has been presented with an absolutely bonkers agenda that will be lucky to wrap up before 1:00am.

First, the Closed Session has items touching on matters of real estate import in multiple areas of the city. There is an item referring to negotiations concerning the property next to Shalimar Park, which was briefly discussed at the Planning Commission last week and will be further discussed tonight. There is also an item to discuss “price and terms of payment” with Jamboree Housing regarding the proposed Senior Center parking lot housing development. When I caught up on the Parks and Community Services (PACS) Commission meeting earlier this week, Director Brian Gruner mentioned in his director’s report that PACS is planning at least one community outreach meeting to discuss the impact of the project’s construction phase on access to the Senior Center. So obviously the city believes that project is moving forward… I wonder what these discussions could be about?

Next, Staff has put together a packed Consent Calendar with fifteen (!) items, all of which the Staff is trying to pass off as “routine in nature”. Uh huh. Given that many of these items do not seem routine, it sure feels like the Staff is rushing to make up for lost time this year (I bet those looooong summer breaks are looking a little less wise in hindsight, huh) and wants to jam some of these items through with as little discussion as possible.

So which items will land on black and get pulled by the public or a City Council member, drawing this ridiculous agenda out even further? Here are the ones I’d watch for:

• Approval of the City Council Meeting Calendar for 2025. The Staff intend to preemptively cancel the first meeting in January as well as the first meeting in July to accommodate a Chambers technology upgrade and City Hall’s workload around the July 3 fireworks show, respectively. The thing is, these two meetings get canceled every year. At some point it just seems absurd to not just say the truth out loud: cancelling these meetings is a Staff entitlement, which allows them to enjoy the tail end of the winter holiday season without having to prepare and agenda report and to potentially travel/take a long weekend on July 4th. Now, I’m supportive of folks taking time off, but I’m not happy this comes at the expense of the public’s business. This pattern means the city goes months at a time with only a single meeting (often December – January and July – August), and that leads to overstuffed agendas like the one we have today. Can’t we reschedule these meetings to dates that otherwise would be Study Sessions, so that at least something can get done?
• Grant Application for Regional Signal Sync Project. While I love active transportation and I love what this grant proposes to do — if the City wins it, it would upgrade signals throughout the Bristol corridor to include accessible signals (think audible walk countdowns) and video detection systems to allow the signals to change when bicycles are waiting for a light, just like a car — its inclusion on the Consent Calendar is a sneaky way to usurp budgeting authority from the City Council. Buried in the Agenda Report is that winning the grant will require a $290,000 local match coming from the City – an amount that is not currently budgeted. So if we win, the Staff will come back to the City Council next year with an appropriation request that will be backed with a “use it or lose it” grant. I’m all for going after these grants, but burying this kind of bootstrap spending in the Consent Calendar is no bueno for transparency and good governance.
• Signal Modernization Project. Another traffic signal project, this one would sign the City up for ~$300k of design services to make a plan to upgrade signals at up to 129 intersections across the city (basically all of them) to include all kinds of amenities, including larger traffic lights and, my personal favorite, leading pedestrian intervals at up to 49 of those intersections. Why might this one get pulled from the Consent Calendar? I wouldn’t be surprised to see some active transportation folks pull it just to give kudos to the Staff. Even if this item is only for design services, getting this work done would be a huge deal, and is one of those invisible improvements that really will make the city better.
• Contract with West Coast Arborists for Tree Services. This one just strikes me as odd: We’re going to contract for $1,100,000 a year with a private firm to take care of our many city trees, based on an agreement negotiated and bid by another city (the City of Rialto). We aren’t going to do any negotiating or putting the contract out to bid ourselves; we’re just going to trust that the City of Rialto did their homework, even though their tree demographics and needs are likely to be very different from ours. What? Is that typical? If there is a problem with the contract, do we have to run those problems by the City of Rialto as well? And is it weird that this one contractor appears to have cornered the market on tree services in Orange County? This firm also trims trees for Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, Orange, Santa Ana, Tustin, County of Orange, Orange County Fire Authority, and the Orange County Sanitation District. That’s a lot of market power. Call me crazy but I think it is strange to sign contracts for millions of dollars a year without running our own RFP process.
• Security Services for Lions Park and NMUSD Sites. As part of the grand bargain addressing the fencing issue at Harper Park last year, Newport-Mesa Unified School District (NMUSD) also agreed to open up fields at three elementary schools (Rea, Whittier and Wilson) to public use on the condition that the City pay for full time security guards to patrol the sites during public use hours. Now that contract is up for renewal. While this particular contract isn’t that controversial, it isn’t all that sustainable, either. The requirement for the security guards effectively imposes significant rent requirements on the City to access what is, in essence, public land. Instead of getting a proposal to put this program on more solid footing, this feels like an exercise in kicking the can down the road.

What about the rest of the agenda?

Oh man, there are some doozys. First up we have an approval of $25 million in tax-exempt bonds connected to the Motel 6/Project Homekey conversion on Newport Boulevard. My question is: why does the city have to approve these bonds, when it doesn’t appear the city is on the hook for issuing them or for any liabilities associated with them? This feels like some weird California requirement foisted on the cities to provide a fig leaf of “public engagement” for an otherwise completely opaque governmental agency, in this case the California Statewide Communities Development Authority (or CSCDA, which is the actual issuing agency). I feel like the City is an awkward fit for this role, but who am I to second guess California’s transparency approach…

Next up we have the anticipated presentation on our development impact fees, which I’ve already discussed a bit at length. We’ll see if any interesting discussion is generated by our dwindling fees.

Then we’ve got a second-first-reading of the proposed beekeeping ordinance, which had to be edited from the first-first-reading to adjust for the City Council’s radical libertarian tendencies. Hopefully the City Council will be able to wrap this one up with minimal fuss so that the City can get on to actually codifying this ordinance in 2025.

Moving onto New Business, the City Council will evaluate awarding a huge $9 million+ contract to Onyx Paving Company to complete slurry seals and parkway rehabilitation all over the city. No big deal, right? Well, it’s probably worth noting that this very large contract will be the City’s third contract under the Community Workforce Agreement, which may explain its very high price tag. In fact, the Agenda Report quietly notes that most of the other bids came in 10-15% higher than the engineer’s estimate. I’ve been critical of the CWA before and I still think it’s a bad agreement. We’ll never know how much this same project would have cost if it had been bid outside of the CWA’s terms.

Following that discussion we have the much anticipated authorization to purchase the property adjacent to Shalimar Park. I am going to guess this one is actually going to be moved up the agenda and discussed earlier in the night, only because I expect Shalimar community members to show up and the City Council won’t want to keep them waiting past midnight to speak. I am going to withhold writing much about this one until the Staff has a chance to present the item at City Council; I am certain the acquisition is a done deal at this point, but what will be put there instead certainly is not, judging from the discussion of the same item at the Planning Commission.

And last but not least, buried all the way at the end of an already ridiculously stuffed agenda, we have a request to approve pay increases for City Hall’s managers. Sigh. I guess we had to know that this was coming after Staff proposed — and won — pay increases for the City Council members themselves. I have a feeling this one will be punted off the agenda given the late hour, but we’ll see.