Hello friends. Apologies for not recapping the last Planning Commission meeting — as you might have seen, the big ticket item saw a cannabis store actually lose its entitlement, for once — I’ve been a bit busy this week. So you’ll have to catch up on that one on your own. But let’s crack open the new City Council agenda for tomorrow and see what we can learn.

Off the bat we, again, have a very short agenda. After what will likely be a lengthy presentation celebrating March as Women’s History Month, I expect the highlight of the night might actually be in public comment.

Animal Services Committee fallout: TNR on the ropes

Remember when I made you read about feral cats?

Well, I hoped you liked it, because there’s more.

I have a feeling the cat people are going to make themselves known in the City Council chambers tomorrow. And that’s because a little bird told me that the Animal Services Committee’s agenda item on trap-neuter-release (TNR) — the practice of trapping feral cats, fixing them and releasing them into the wild — got quite testy, with the Staff and City Council liaison John Stephens apparently putting the kibosh on bringing a proposed ordinance to legalize the practice by residents to the City Council.

This of course did not sit well with a fair number of Animal Service Committee members who, as you might suspect, believe that waiting almost seven years to bring this item to the City Council’s attention is more than enough. Apparently a fair number of tense words were exchanged and the need for the ASC itself was openly questioned.

And that would be bad enough, except I also understand that a large number of resident cat-activists were also in attendance to see this kerfuffle unfold in real time. Since I wrote about TNR the Daily Pilot picked up the story as well, and it emphasized the abject craziness that is locking a policy in the committee dungeon for seven years. So the cat-activists had to have had every expectation that TNR had finally achieved committee escape velocity. To see that hope get dashed by both the staff (specifically, the CMPD) and the mayor likely sets the stage for an interesting City Council confrontation.

Beyond public comment, the Consent Calendar isn’t particularly long and covers all kinds of routine items, from accepting work done in the Public Works department to purchasing new chillers for City Hall’s air conditioning. Important no doubt but not particularly compelling.

That takes us to the lone new business item.

Starting Phase II (?) of the City’s Information Technology Strategic Plan (ITSP)

Hey look, we found YET ANOTHER of the City’s strategic plans! In fact, this one comes in two pieces: first, a roadmap and executive summary of the ITSP, and second, a five-year cost plan outlining the likely expenses associated with the ITSP. In fact, backing up to the 2020 Study Session agenda report that was published shortly after the ITSP was adopted would be helpful to review, too, as the City took the unusual step of critiquing its own shortcomings.

What I find interesting about that latter document is that, in addition to finding deficits in terms of software, hardware and other tangible resources, it equally focused on internal processes and procedures that needed to be modernized and reformed. For example, that 2020 agenda report notes that the City lacks an IT governance policy and hasn’t adopted IT best practices.

Fast forward to today and, while the present agenda item is quick to tout the capital investments made under the ITSP, it doesn’t mention whether any of the recommended internal reforms took place.

Hopefully Staff will have a good answer for that. Additionally, I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw a few tense public comments about TESSA, the city’s new do-everything-permit-related-software has been under fire recently for being unintuitive, clunky and generally a pain to use.

But despite the public not absolutely loving the Phase I projects, the City seems poised to move on to Phase II. Which, of course, seems to require more consultant money. Thankfully the City has budgeted for this already and has made the sensible decision to glom the City’s work onto the contract for another government’s IT planning, the County of Marin, so the City doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel in terms of negotiating with its preferred counterparty.

Honestly, that’s about all I can squeeze out of this one.

Why does it feel like City Hall is grinding to a halt?