Last week witnessed the rare occurrence of back-to-back meetings in City Hall, with the Planning Commission meeting on Monday and the City Council following up on Tuesday.

Which you would think would result in a flurry of activity.

Planning Commission/City Council Recap

Unfortunately, not much happened:

• The Planning Commission only had two agendized items: the election of Chair and Vice Chair, and a staff presentation on proposed updates to our accessory dwelling unit (ADU) ordinances, as required by a comment letter from the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD). Yes: the latter was a presentation about a proposed update required by law. That’s it. And with respect to the former, Jeff Harlan was elected Chair and Jon Zich was elected Vice Chair. I guess it was kinda fun to see the new Commissioners, Harlan and Rob Dickson, in action, but they were basically given nothing to do.
• The City Council meeting was originally scheduled as a study session on the Fairview Park Master Plan Update (so yes – it was an update for an update) but, sometime during the prior week, it was upgraded to a “Special Meeting”. The reason? Mayor John Stephens wanted take a stab at loosening up Costa Mesa’s restrictions on short-term rentals so that property owners could have more flexibility to provide short-term accommodations for LA fire victims. After some procedural wrangling that item essentially failed 5-2, so Costa Mesa’s short-term rental ban remains. The rest of the meeting was consumed first by a very long Staff presentation on Fairview Park’s master plan update, and second by a rhetorical proxy war in the public comments between ecological purists and the Harbor Soaring Society. The Daily Pilot has a good piece out about that part of the meeting, so if you are curious, feel free to read about it there.

The bottom line is: nothing really happened last week. So what about this week? We’ve got a real City Council meeting on Tuesday, right? Certainly we’re going to see lots of activity?

City Council 2/4 preview

Think again: setting aside the Consent Calendar, we’ve got a one-item agenda for this week.

Before we dive into that matter, I should note that I expect Consent Calendar Item #8 to be pulled, either by a Council Member or by a member of the public, as it proposes hiring PlaceWorks, Inc. as an on-call contractor for staff support and general planning services. Recall was almost a year ago this month that PlaceWorks’s performance as the lead consultant on the Fairview Developmental Center planning process so disappointed the City Council that it barred them from providing the city a different set of on-call consulting services. I would expect annoyed residents or their representatives will request that a similar prohibition be made here. Speaking of which, we haven’t seen hide or hair of the Fairview Developmental Center project since last summer — unless, of course, you count its mysterious appearance in Closed Session last September, under “real property negotiations”. 🤨 What is going on there?

The sole regular agenda item is (on the surface) a real snoozer: awarding a contact to install essentially a trash catcher at one of the Costa Mesa Golf Course’s storm drains to prevent garbage from contaminating storm water runoff. Seems unoffensive.

But of course, I’ve got questions.

Is this contract subject to the Community Workforce Agreement? Remember the CWA, which requires unionized labor to be used for major city public works projects? Well, I certainly do. While this specific item is not included on Attachment F to the CWA, I would note that “Westside Storm Drain Improvements” certainly is. And, as it turns out, the trash catcher is going to be more expensive than the city budgeted, so the Public Works department is proposing to raid the Westside Storm Drain Improvements fund to cover the shortfall. So, is this a “Westside Storm Drain Improvement”? The item’s Agenda Report doesn’t mention the CWA, and neither does the proposed public works agreement with the selected contractor, Zusser Company, Inc. So clearly the city is taking the position this project isn’t subject to it. But, given it’s a close-ish call, it would have been nice for the Agenda Report to analyze the CWA’s applicability.

Circling back to the proposed contractor, who is Zusser? At first, the contractor’s profile jumped out at me because it listed as its address a strip mall in Pacific Palisades, which of course, pretty much burnt to the ground a few weeks ago. Hopefully that’s just its mailing address. In any event, that question led me to a quick Google, and it turns out that Zusser has a very thin book of prior work — as far as I can tell, the projects that the Agenda Report lists for this contractor are the only projects it has completed.

But something else popped up in my search: a 2022 decision from the State of California Department of Industrial Relations fining Zusser for over $650,000 for violating prevailing wage laws. That makes the CWA questions all the more interesting. Not only is the city taking the position that this project isn’t subject to the CWA, it is also proposing a contractor that was recently slapped on the wrist for violating labor laws.

In Zusser’s defense, mistakes happen. But I’ll be curious if any of the Council Members raise questions about the contractor’s qualifications.

What’s missing, part 1: the impacts of federal activity

I was shocked to see that the agenda does not include a Staff update on the potential impacts of either President Trump’s proposed across-the-board federal spending freeze or his insistence on stepping up immigration enforcement, including the newly passed Laken Riley Act (the latter of which I discussed here).

The spending freeze, while facing resistance in the courts, jeopardizes literally trillions of dollars of federal grants. While defenders of the freezes will rightly point out the federal government routinely funds ridiculous, wasteful nonsense, they may not be entirely aware how dependent local governments are on such funding. So while I was glad to see that the Active Transportation Committee will get an update this week on how the on-again, off-again freezes may impact future streets projects, I am appalled that a committee will get that information before the City Council does. The City Manager must have a lot of undisclosed detail forthcoming in her comments, right?

Equally, the City Manager needs to come clean to the public about her proposed approach to President Trump’s insistence on strict immigration enforcement, including turning over arrestees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. The agenda for this meeting and the last meeting both reference “threat to security” items in the closed session agenda; based on info I received about the recent inter-district meeting a week or so ago, I believe this “threat” refers specifically to potential ICE activity in the city. It’s pretty clear that there are a lot of residents that are deeply concerned about this. As our neighbors run off in opposite directions (Huntington Beach to the right, Santa Ana to the left), we need to get a better understanding of what the city is proposing to do here. Like, now, and not in closed session.

What’s missing, part 2: Aren’t the Tewinkle lakes still leaking?!

Finally, the whole matter regarding the trash catcher contract above reminded me to review the City’s ongoing bids for public works projects, which amazingly are publicly disclosed. And I’m kinda regretting I did. It’s reminded me of all of the very large open projects that are not on this agenda. In addition to the Fairview Developmental Center, which at this point is experiencing a criminal level of radio silence, we’re also missing updates on the reconstruction of Fire Station #2, the bus shelter advertising contract that expired last year, and the very significant reconstruction of Fairview Road planned (hopefully) for this year.

But since we’re on the topic of belaboring the CWA, I wanted to highlight that the Tewinkle lakes repair project went back out to bid last fall, and lo and behold, it once again only received one bid. As a quick recap, this project was originally bid out in the Spring of 2024, only to result in a single bid that was almost double the Public Works Department’s original cost estimate. At the time, the City blamed the CWA for limiting the number of qualified contractors, and proposed that the project be removed from the CWA project list and replaced with other projects.

Obviously it would be nice to know if the Public Works department had been successful in removing the Tewinkle lakes project from the CWA, and more importantly, what new projects were added to the CWA to make up for it. I argued at the time, and still believe, that any expansions of the scope of the CWA should be reviewed and approved by the City Council, rather than being ministerially approved by the City Manager.

But in any event, whatever Public Works did, it didn’t work. As mentioned above the city only got a single bid the second time around, and to add insult to injury, it’s the same bidder as last time. It at least has the courtesy to knock off about $200k from the ticket price, not it materially changes matters.

What a disaster. The Tewinkle lakes have been actively leaking water at least since 2021, and the failure of certain pump systems in the lakes has caused all kinds of ecological problems. Not only did it take the city two years to come up with a design to fix these issues, it’s now taken more than a year just to select a contractor to do the work. All in the city’s premier, showcase public park. C’mon guys. That at least deserves an update from the City Manager.