Once again the City Council has a suspiciously manageable agenda ahead of them tonight. But I think there might be more than meets the eye, so let’s crack it open and take a look.

Praise for Chief Lawrence will likely open the meeting

After a presentation of the City’s newly selected poet laureate, I would be shocked if public and council member comments didn’t dwell on Police Chief Ron Lawrence’s recently announced retirement. I expect this discussion to be effusive for the outgoing Chief, who will leave big shoes to fill come June.

Consent calendar: Lots of tricky little issues; will any of them be discussed?

As you probably know by now, the consent calendar typically contains “matters considered routine”, such that they can be voted on in one motion without a discussion. And while I think many of the items on the consent calendar this time around fit that bill, there are a couple that I think pose some interesting questions for the City Council if they choose to dwell on them.

City-manager-as-principal-negotiator brings up old COIN issues

First, there is an item designating City Manager Lori Ann Farrell Harrison as the principal negotiator on soon-to-expire labor memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with three of Costa Mesa’s biggest public employee unions: the Costa Mesa Police Management Association (CMPMA), the Costa Mesa Police Association (CMPA), and the Costa Mesa City Employees’ Association (CMCEA).

Now my understanding is that designating the City Manager as the principal negotiator for these kinds of discussions isn’t atypical for cities with council-manager forms of government. However, it was atypical for Costa Mesa. While I don’t want to dwell on the past, Costa Mesa’s old Civic Openness in Negotiations (COIN) ordinance previously barred city employees from serving as principal negotiators for these kinds of contracts, as doing so would present “an inherent conflict of interest”.

And it’s not hard to see why. The City Manager is a city employee herself, and after the negotiations are said and done, she still has to lead and manage the same employees whose union she just negotiated against. That makes it very difficult for her to take a hard line against those unions. If she even wants to: although she knows better than anyone the state of the city’s finances, she’s human, too. I have no doubt she would like to see her own compensation grow over time, and it would be hard to ask for that if she was also leading the charge to keep rank-and-file salaries in check.

For various reasons that I don’t think primarily had to do with the city employee ban, Costa Mesa did away with the COIN ordinance several years ago. However, following that decision, it looks like City Hall and the City Council opted to maintain a non-employee as the principal negotiator; for example, the city’s long-time outside labor counsel, Peter Brown of Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, was tapped for that role back in 2022.

So what has changed? I have no idea. The Council’s new labor transparency policy, which replaced the COIN ordinance, still requires the principal negotiator to be “free of any actual or potential conflict of interest with respect to the bargaining unit”. While the new policy does not explicitly barring city employees from serving in this role, that doesn’t wipe away the COIN ordinance’s prior judgment that such service would involve “inherent” conflicts. So I would welcome an explanation from the City Manager as to how she intends to ring-fence herself in this role, especially vis-a-vis City Hall employees. Personally I’d stick with the outside counsel.

You want what for traffic signals? $700,000 per year to keep the lights on

Well that escalated quickly. Just over a year ago, our outside spend to maintain our traffic signals and to do emergency repairs was humming along at $400,000. One year and two amendments later (one last year, one proposed for tonight), the annual spend is set to increase 75% to $700,000.

Parsing the agenda report, this seems to be happening due to a confluence of three trends: first, we’ve been doing a lot of signal upgrades in the past couple of years, in particular to develop smarter signals that can detect bicyclists and pedestrians as well as cars. We’ve also added new signals, again mostly to address the increased pedestrianization of certain areas, so we simply have more stuff to maintain.

But in addition to that, each maintenance task is becoming more expensive thanks to overall inflation.

And finally, apparently our poles and traffic infrastructure is getting hit by cars quite frequently. The Agenda Report estimates that costs associated with vehicle strikes more than doubled in the last six months of 2024 compared to the first six months of that year.

Now, I get that City Hall (and by extension, the City Council) may feel a bit backed into a corner with this one. Having down traffic signals all the time would “severely impact public safety”, as the Agenda Report ominously intones.

But I do wonder if it would be a good idea to take this opportunity to ask: how can we avoid this situation in the future? In particular, I’m curious why we are happy to settle for an outside contractor to handle these tasks, rather than building internal capacity. It’s not like the traffic signals are going anywhere, and if anything, they are likely to get even more larded up with tech doodads in the future. Shouldn’t we be developing the capability to maintain this technology on our own?

And for goodness sakes, please just put bollards around the tech equipment and poles. If drivers are driving up on the sidewalk and crashing into things often enough to double our maintenance spend on poles and utility boxes, then that’s a public safety hazard unto itself! Who knows: a few well placed bollards might accidentally even shield a pedestrian or two one day.

The last gasp (?) for rental assistance

Also tucked into the Consent Calendar is the disclosure — not the proposal, mind you — that City Hall has unilaterally transferred $175,000 of “unallocated” HOME funds (a.k.a., Federal grants through the Home Investment Partnerships program) to two existing HOME fund programs, one that provides rehab grants/loans to Costa Mesa homeowners and another that provides tenant-based rental assistance (TBRA) to Costa Mesa residents that meet certain income requirements. In a move that’s a bit too cute for my taste, City Staff says they can do this allocation without triggering a “substantial amendment” of the City’s HOME Annual Action Plan, because it modifies the appropriation amount by less than 45% — $175,000 is 44%.

Now, to make that allocation stick, the City Council is being asked to amend the TBRA contract with its outside contractor, Families First, to provide another $50,000 in assistance funds as well as to permit up to three annual renewals. Actually, the agenda report is a bit fuzzy on this point; while the proposed contract amendment contemplates those three annual renewals, City Staff is actually asking City Council to authorize five annual renewals, which I suppose will get dropped into a new version of the amendment on renewal.

But wait, where is all this money going to come from? Aren’t we in the new Trump Golden Age? Doesn’t that mean that federal sources of funding, like the HOME funds, should be immediately suspect?

While the Agenda Report implies that the contracts for these programs will only get renewed as the City secures new HOME fund grants, there is one curious line near the end in reference to fiscal impact: “Funding for renewal years will be available within the Department’s operating
budget.” Say what? Why would these programs come out of the operating budget, and not be entirely contingent on securing HOME funds?

Hopefully someone just got their wires crossed. While I can see TBRA in particular as a necessary program in light of the COVID-19 upheavals and the subsequent turbulence in the rental market, I think it’s beyond time for Costa Mesa to critically evaluate that program and ask whether it makes sense for the city to continue it. A city government is very poorly positioned to do redistributive justice, especially when the need is practically endemic to our high-cost environment at this point. And let’s be honest: I don’t think we have the money. Period.

The “big” items: ADUs will likely sail through, and Fire Station No. 2 gets spendy

Outside the consent calendar, the City Council only has two regular items: first, a second reading of the ADU ordinance discussed at the last City Council meeting, and second, a consideration of a construction management contract for the upcoming rebuild of Fire Station No. 2.

With respect to the ADU ordinance, I think this one will pass easily without too much discussion. The ordinance prevailed 7-0 at the March 18 meeting with minimal changes, and I’m not aware that anything has changed since then that should result in a different outcome tonight.

That said, I expect the the discussion of the second item to chew up considerable time. And that is because there is one teensy, weensy problem with hiring Accenture, an outside construction management firm, to the tune of almost $2,000,000 ($1,774,775 contract price + 10% contingency) to oversee the construction of Fire Station No. 2: the city doesn’t have the money to build it.

At least, not yet. Remember when last year’s capital improvement budget seemed to inexplicitly jump up compared to 2023? Recall that the reason was that the CIP budget assumed that the city would be floating a $20,000,000 bond to cover certain projects, including the rebuild of Fire Station No. 2. At the time, some of the City Council members balked at the prospect (ok, it was Don Harper), and nothing was heard about that very large bond again. Until now.

Also, in a bit of budgetary slight-of-hand, City Hall seems to have increased the project’s budget. In the adopted 2024-2025 CIP budget, construction for Fire Station No. 2 was estimated to be $10,000,000. Now, the Agenda Report now estimates the construction cost to be $12,000,000.

So… Where is the extra $2,000,000 — which, by the way, happens to be about the amount of the proposed construction management contract — going to come from? Is it getting rolled into the bond? Apparently, yes: a careful reading of the report reveals that the City’s CIP budget can only cover the initial payment of this contract, or $225,000. After that, the rest of the payment to the construction management firm will be contingent on the bond payment.

Which brings me to my last question: isn’t $2,000,000 for construction management services a bit high? That would be over 16% of the total estimated construction cost of $12 million. So we’ve got a rich contract and we’re going to be paying for it with municipal debt. Doesn’t sound like a great deal to me. Especially for a city that isn’t super confident about its financial footing.

The problem is, once you sign a $2 million contract to build the thing, it will be almost impossible to resist floating that bond. There simply is no other pot of money available at that scale without cutting the CIP budget past the bone. But I would hope that the City Council realizes that they are having that conversation now, and not later. If they want to put a hand on the steering wheel, now is the time.

UPDATE: One more thing! The Committee Appointments!

There is one more item on the agenda: City Committees will get their appointments for vacant positions. I have a LOT of thoughts on the consequentialness of these selections. But that will need to wait for another day.