Well. For a meeting that on its face looked to be pretty underwhelming, it may well have been one of the most important meetings in recent memory. I strongly recommend you watch the meeting in full yourself. From cleanse-your-palate patriotism to good governance to artificial intelligence, this meeting had it all. But if you want my take on the highlights, keep reading.

The residents rescue the National Anthem after a technological snafu

In what turned out to be a beautiful moment, the meeting opened with a significant technological snafu: the clerk attempted to play a recording of the national anthem, but the volume was stuck at a nearly inaudible level. About half-way through the audience gave up straining to hear and undertook singing the anthem themselves, which you can faintly hear on the video recording. I happened to be there and it was a beautiful moment. And it stands in stark contrast to the tense environments of other City Halls, where conflicts over national issues have spilled over into shouting matches and even arrests.

TNR gets its day in Council, whether the CMPD likes it or not

As expected the resident cat-activists of Costa Mesa showed up in public comment to protest the attempted stealth euthanasia of the trap-neuter-release (TNR) policy in the Animal Service Committee (ASC). Man, they did not disappoint. Likely stunning the City Council members who, unless they followed along with us, probably didn’t see this issue coming, resident after resident stepped up to the lecterns to describe the feral-cat-related services they have been providing to the city completely gratis and without a lick of recognition for years.

Frankly, even as a former ASC member myself, I wasn’t fully aware of the lengths to which these residents were going to address the moral and public health issues associated with our feral cat population. Some residents testified to coming out-of-pocket for thousands of dollars of vet treatments, spending untold hours caring for feral cats, and working tirelessly to try to stop the cat overpopulation problem by fixing cats on their own.

In any event, after this excellent testimony, the City Council members themselves were left with no choice but to support at least exploring TNR, with Mayor Pro Tem Manuel Chavez going so far as to request that TNR be agendized for the City Council as promptly as practicable.

Which has to be the exact opposite of the result that the Costa Mesa Police Department (CMPD) wanted. How did this go so wrong for them?

Actually, it’s pretty simple: the CMPD made a strategic error in not allowing the ASC to make its presentation to the City Council directly; instead, it allowed itself to be outflanked in public comment. While I wasn’t at the ASC meeting last week my understanding was that the CMPD made it clear that it didn’t want to see a motion to send the TNR materials to City Council. Unfortunately the new Chair of the ASC understood this directive and complied.

But this attempt to squelch TNR in the ASC backfired big time. By taking to the microphones in public comment instead of getting an agendized item for discussion, the cat-activists and the former chair of the ASC, Becca Walls, got essentially unlimited free air-time to make their case directly to the City Council, in public, without giving the CMPD an opportunity to respond.

The CMPD may have belatedly realized this error as, to my surprise, former Costa Mesa Animal Control Officer Anna Rodriguez showed up in public comment to give the case against TNR. Failing to provide her name and identifying herself only as a long-time resident and someone “who has been in the animal care business for almost 40 years,” it would have been easy for many in the audience to miss Ms. Rodriguez’s former affiliation with the CMPD. Dig a bit more and you likely won’t be surprised to learn that she was also the CMPD’s leading opponent of TNR when it was discussed during her time with the city.

If the item had simply been agendized, the CMPD would have been able to give lengthy testimony on the potential drawbacks of a TNR policy, including its concerns about burdening precious animal control officer hours and creating an unfunded mandate within the department. Instead that burden fell to Ms. Rodriguez, who, all due respect, was not nearly as compelling as a current CMPD officer would have been. And her dissembling about her actual interest in this issue made it look much worse.

But there’s more. Even if Mayor John Stephens wanted to ride the CMPD’s rescue, he wasn’t able to do so. Due to City Council comment practice, every member of the City Council gets an opportunity to speak before the Mayor gives his comments. Accordingly, he ended up being hamstrung by the positive TNR comments by his fellow Council Members who preceded him. In the end, and perhaps because he was also legitimately persuaded by the excellent resident presentations, he joined the call for the item to be agendized.

I hope City Hall learns a valuable lesson from this episode: bottling up valid committee items won’t make them go away. Other city committee members will see how the TNR issue unfolded, and if they are smart, they’ll recognize that it is a blueprint for moving items out of the committee room and into the City Council chambers without having to ask Staff for permission. Given such policy exuberance could certainly get out of hand, perhaps Staff will realize that an orderly process to work with committee members to express their ideas to City Council is in its best interest. Not only will this bolster the image of the city’s responsiveness, it will also give City Hall an opportunity to explain its position and give feedback.

Or it can keep doing it the hard way.

Buley grabs two critical third-rails: Housing Element compliance and City Council agenda control

In his comments, newly-elected City Council Member Mike Buley bristled at State limitations on the City’s enforcement of its zoning and parking codes. “At some point,” he mused out loud as he contemplated how State laws prohibit requiring parking for certain developments, “the State can overreach to the extent that it can be unconstitutional.”

While he backed away from asking the City Attorney to look into actual litigation on the City’s behalf, it’s clear he’s concerned about the State’s housing mandates. He also reiterated his complaint from last meeting that, although the Housing Element requires substantial rezoning to comply with State housing laws, the State was not coming forward with funding to help the city address that significant undertaking.

And he’s right, but perhaps for reasons he’s unaware of. The State is not withholding funds that cities need to comply with the State’s mandates. On the contrary, that funding is available and other cities are freely spending it.

The problem is that the City of Costa Mesa is not eligible for that funding because it does not have a compliant Housing Element — a situation that could have been (and should have been) avoided. Council Member Buley, who admits he is still in the process of “being educated”, should probably look into why the city is out of compliance. The long, complicated story as I understand it has been sitting in draft form on my computer for a while, and maybe I should brush it off soon.

The short version is that the city’s failure to move quickly to address the comments made by the California Department Housing and Community Development (HCD) to our draft Housing Element, as well as a potential misreading by Staff of the HCD deadlines, led the city to miss a critical deadline in the Fall of 2022. This blown deadline condemned our Housing Element to being out of compliance for the foreseeable future and also undermined the city’s eligibility for future grant funds to offset the substantial work the Housing Element requires.

Now, while I’m sure some will argue that Measure Y prevented the city from doing the work necessary to achieve Housing Element compliance in a timely fashion, I don’t think that’s the case. I’m no defender of Measure Y. But Newport Beach managed to achieve Housing Element compliance even though its similar vote-on-development measure, the “Greenlight” initiative, also impeded certain of its programs.

And thus Newport Beach is likely getting funding for its Housing Element programs and we are not. I hope Council Member Buley keeps pulling on this thread. There is a lot to unravel.

Council Member Buley also used his comment time to question the procedure for members of the City Council to place items on the agenda, which has been on my mind as well. After assuring Staff that he wasn’t interested in “micromanaging” the process, he wondered if it would be possible for the City Council to give some input to Staff on what would appear on the next agenda.

What was interesting was that he got direct support for this line of inquiry from Mayor Stephens, someone who has clashed with the City Manager over “micromanagement”.

Personally, I would call it appropriate oversight, but I digress.

In his own comments, Mayor Stephens first disclosed something new to me, which was that the Mayor and the Mayor Pro Tem were given a preview of the likely City Council agenda about a week before the meeting. He then forcefully reiterated the right of City Council members to place items on the agenda sua sponte, noting, for example, that the City’s July 3rd fireworks celebration would not have been placed on the agenda for approval absent his personal efforts to put it there.

Then he threw down the gauntlet. “Bring stuff forward!” he challenged his fellow Council Members. “You were all elected. It is a big deal to get elected, especially in this town; it takes a lot of time and a lot of money and you are entitled to put items on the agenda and I will support you.”

YOLO, indeed, Mayor Stephens. And I am here for it.

But one impediment that stands in the way of City Council members putting items on the agenda willy-nilly is that the city has a policy that implicitly puts the power to approve those items in the hands of the City Manager. City Council Policy 300-6, which can be accessed via this link with a bit of scrolling, outlines the basic rules: yes, a Council Member can propose to agendize an item an item at will, but only if doing so is anticipated to take less than 4 hours of staff time. If the item will take more than 4 hours of staff time — and rest assured, placing an item on the agenda, developing a Staff Report, and preparing a presentation on an item will almost certainly breach that time limit — then such an item must be approved by the City Manager, first (or the City Attorney if it addresses a legal issue). So the City Council may not have as free a hand as Mayor Stephens implies.

The way City Council Policy 300-6 works in practice is worth its own post, so I hope to have some time to devote to it at some point. Needless to say I am concerned it doesn’t provide enough flexibility to our elected officials to have a substantive impact on city policy.

Finally, an otherwise dry item addresses the AI-elephant in the room

The discussion on the lone agenda item, the acceptance of the consultant contract for “phase II” of the city’s information technology strategic plan (ITSP), saw another interesting tag-team by Mayor Stephens and Council Member Buley.

Once again, Buley opened the door by asking a very good, and very plugged-in question. In light of the massive advances being made in artificial intelligence (AI), he began, how can we be assured that any IT plan the City puts in place that is intended to cover five or even ten years won’t be quickly rendered obsolete? ThirdWave, the consultant the city has tapped for its ITSP, gamely answered that this wasn’t its first rodeo and that its been preparing cities for “what’s next” for decades.

Which might be so. But more importantly, Mayor Stephens keyed off this question to note that AI has been on the minds of mayors around the country for some time now. He noted that other cities are putting real money into studying the implementation of AI and, in a newsworthy bit of exposition, implored the City Staff to look at the 2025-2026 budget and do the same. “I would love for us to be on the cutting edge, maybe even the bleeding edge, in the county, in the State of California, in the United States” in terms of IT and AI integration, Mayor Stephens implored.

And may it be so. This whole exchange reminded me very vividly of a recent podcast by Ezra Klein, in which he interviewed Ben Buchanan, former special adviser to President Joe Biden on artificial intelligence. Klein opens the episode with a startling statement: “while there is so much else going on in the world to cover, I do think there’s a good chance that, when we look back on this era in human history, A.I. will have been the thing that matters.”

What ensues is a lengthy (and very worthy-of-your-time) discussion about the likely emergence of “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) — the ability of an AI to outperform a human being at pretty much any cognitive task — under the Trump Administration. Eventually the discussion turns to the application of AI to the government.

After lamenting the sclerotic functioning of the federal government, Klein essentially asks, “is government too slow to take advantage of AI?” to which Buchanan effectively responds, “yes”. When it comes to AI, therefore, government simply must move faster, even if it means breaking things:

The existence of my job as the White House special adviser for A.I. — which David Sacks is now — and I had this job in 2023 — existed because President Biden said very clearly, both publicly and privately: We cannot move at the typical government pace. We have to move faster here.

I think we probably need to be careful, and I’m not here for stripping it all down. But I agree with you. We have to move much faster.

Ben Buchanan on the Ezra Klein Show, “The Government Knows AGI is Coming”, March 4, 2025

I tend to be in agreement with Klein: after all is said and done, I think the next twenty years or so will be defined by the extent to which our governments respond to rapid technological change.

So for a short(ish) meeting on a relatively obscure topic, I wonder if it will turn out to be a fairly consequential one. Perhaps the city really will, in the long run, embrace an AI-enabled future. And if it does, we will be able to look back at this moment and see that it started with an otherwise benign discussion on a Tuesday night in March.