Unblending The Retirees

Last night, the Council decided to provide one more transition year to the City’s 140 retirees who purchase medical insurance from the City. It’ll cost us $220,000 – but it will provide a softer landing for the retirees who have traditionally counted on favorable City medical insurance rates, and it will save us a lot of money in the long run.

This story is a good example of the financial pressures the City faces, and the hard decisions that we on the Council have to make as those financial pressures grow. It’s also a good story about collaboration and about innovative solutions within government.

Many city employees retire before the age of 65, meaning they are not yet eligible for Medicare. Faced with the question of what to do about medical insurance in the meantime, about 140 of these younger retirees currently buy it through the City’s program. Traditionally, the retirees and the current employees were put into the same pool and purchased insurance at the same rate – a rate that was lower for the retirees than they otherwise would pay (because their medical costs generally are higher) but higher for the employees than they would otherwise pay (because they were subsidizing the retirees). The City is not required to provide retirees with medical insurance at the same rate as current employees, but it was longstanding practice and most of our younger retirees had come to depend on it.

In the last few years, of course, the price that everyone pays has gone way up. And, more recently, the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) has changed its practices and will soon require that the City (and all other government agencies) calculate the cost of all retiree medical benefits as a liability on our books. A quick calculation by the city’s staff concluded that this figure would currently be $5 million. In the years ahead, as more and more people retire, it would grow to $24 million. This liability would harm the city’s overall balance sheet and could hurt our credit rating. And, of course, it would mean the rates for our current employees would just keep going up and up.

This is kind of like Social Security. The more retirees there are, the harder it for those still working to pay the bill.

So last fall, we voted to “unblend” the rate, meaning current employees paid a rate based on their own actuarial and risk factors and retirees paid a separate rate based on their factors. We did it, frankly, without a whole lot of discussion. The result was a big hit for some of our younger retirees. The typical individual saw his or her rate double, from about $500 to $1,000 per month, under Blue Shield. (Kaiser, which had just taken over Buenaventura Medical Group, had not yet unblended the rates and so their rates were still low.)

Not surprisingly, this caused a backlash. In November, Councilmembers Neal Andrews and Jim Monahan proposed reconsidering this action – and more than 100 out of the 140 retirees packed the council chamber in support. We agreed to subsidize 50% of the increased rates for one year (calendar year 2007) – a hit of about $400,000 on the General Fund. We also agreed to create a task force, including Councilmembers Andrews and Ed Summers, to work out a longer-term solution.

And we did. The proposal that came before us last night was a pretty good solution, and included a tolerable increase for most people. Kaiser has now unblended the rate and so the typical individual will now pay $500 a month, up from $300 a month last year. (It’s more than $1,000 a month for two or more people.)

But the task force also found another solution to the high Blue Shield costs. Riverside County has negotiated low rates with Blue Shield and has now offered this program – known as Exclusive Care Select – to other government agencies as well. Ventura County is likely to join, as are Orange and San Bernardino Counties. By joining this program – essentially, contracting with Riverside County to join their program – it looks like we’ll be able to soften the blow, and bring the retiree premiums to around $530 a month for an individual and $1,000 for a couple.

This is a pretty good application of a theory floating around in public administration circles these days. The theory suggests that government agencies should not try to do everything. Rather, they should specialize in what they are good at, and then contract with each other for the good stuff. For example, if the County’s better at 911 than we are, let’s contract with them. Our deal with Exclusive Care Select is a good example. Riverside County is good at this stuff. So we’re going to contract with them to help provide more affordable health insurance for our younger retirees.

And we’re giving the retirees a bit of a soft landing besides. We agreed to subsidize their transition for one more year – at half the previous level, or $220,000. That works out, on average, to about $130 per month per retiree. (We rejected another alternative, which was to phase the subsidy out over four years, at a cost of almost $1 million.)

Our subsidies are real money, of course; this is money we will have to come up with in the short run from existing sources of funds. And we weren’t contractually obligated to provide this transition period.

But our own employees clearly believed we had a moral obligation to them. We did not want to risk our long-term credit rating. And by working together with the retirees, we found an innovative solution that, we hope, will maintain affordable medical insurance premiums for them in the long run. Who says government can’t be innovative?

Why I Backed Off On Reconfiguring Victoria

One of the things I hate about politicians is that when they run into political resistance, they often change course and don’t admit it. They make it look as though the changed course is a perfectly logical result of a thoughtful process, not the result of political pressure. So let me make something very clear: I backed off of the idea of reconfiguring the lanes on Victoria because most everybody in town seemed to think it was a bad idea.

On Monday night, the City Council voted 6-1 to move forward with the a new development code for Victoria Avenue – which requires an environmental impact report and other process considerations – but scrapped the “streetscape” part of the Victoria plan. This was the controversial idea of reconfiguring the traffic lanes in Victoria so that only six would be through-traffic lanes, while the other two would be local traffic and turning lanes. I voted to scrap the reconfiguration.

A politician has to admit when he’s not on the same page as his constituents. I’ve never had so much negative comment on any position that I’ve taken in four years on the council. Though a few people came to our defense, most constituents who expressed an opinion did so in very strong terms – calling us idiots or morons. Frankly, I got tired of defensively explaining that I wasn’t advocating eliminating any lanes, just using them in a different way. And I was waiting to see what our traffic planners told us about how this would affect traffic flow.

But when an idea doesn’t get traction, it’s okay to move on. So we’re moving forward with what we agree on rather than dwell on what we disagree on. And what we agree on is this: Victoria should strengthen its position as an important business district, especially for professional services firms. It will continue to have important retail, restaurant, and residential components, of course – the Victoria corridor really is a truly “mixed use” area, with everything you need in one place. But given its proximity to the Ventura County Government Center, it only makes sense to try to strengthen the office base in the area. By changing the code to encourage more office uses -- without eliminating any existing retail or other businesses – we can make a long-term commitment to prosperity.

Not only have I never gotten so much negative comment on an issue, I’ve never seen an issue that had so many dimensions. They’re endless.

Jim Monahan quite rightly pointed out that part of the traffic problem is the fact that Victoria serves as the southbound connector between 126 and 101. On Monday night, I reiterated my promise to Jim that I would talk with my fellow transportation commissioners and Caltrans about moving the 126-101 connector project up the list (it’s currently last).

All of our planning efforts in East Ventura have led me to believe, even more than before, that we have to do something to move traffic north and south. Mills Road by the mall is very busy, as is Victoria at rush hour. Wells Road south of Highway 126 has gotten very crowded, especially in the morning rush. We could try to push Johnson Drive across the 126 freeway or Kimball Road down across the Santa Clara River. But both these efforts would require building a bridge and winning a SOAR vote. To do Johnson we’d have to widen the street between Ralston and Bristol, where people live in single-family houses close to the right-of-way; and to do Kimball we’d have to work with Oxnard, which may or may not be receptive.

Then there are all the large employers who rely on the Victoria corridor, especially the county, the school district (which has five schools in the vicinity of Victoria and Telegraph), and the college, whose staff and students come up Victoria and turn left on Telegraph. I still hope we can have a dialogue with all these employers and institutions to discuss whether we can alleviate rush-hour congestion by staggering everyone’s schedule.

Finally, of course, there’s Wal-Mart, which is preparing an application to build a store where the Kmart is currently located adjacent to Trader Joe’s. A lot of folks around town want us to keep Wal-Mart out, while a lot of other folks think we’re dragging our feet and foregoing lots of needed sales tax revenue by not falling all over ourselves to welcome them.

The truth is it’s very difficult to keep any individual company from doing business in our city . Constitutionally, our planning policies cannot distinguish between Wal-Mart and, say, Kmart or Target . Wal-Mart has already taken down a 20-year lease on the Kmart site and there would be nothing to prevent them from simply moving into that building (which is about 100,000 square feet).

But that’s not what it appears they are planning to do. In May, when they showed the city staff a new design (which apparently looked good in urban design and “green building” terms), they also hiked the size of the building from what they had previously discussed. It’s now apparently a 150,000-square-foot supercenter, complete with groceries. .

Some of the folks opposed to Wal-Mart have been encouraging us to pass an “anti-big-box” ordinance. But, as our Community Development Director Nelson Hernandez pointed out the other night, we already have mechanisms in place to deal with very large stores. Any retail store over 50,000 feet in the Victoria Corridor now has to go to the Planning Commission for a special permit, and under the proposed Victoria code it would be very, very difficult – if not impossible – to approve a store of more than 90,000 square feet.

All of which means that Wal-Mart might have to bag the groceries and settle for a smaller store, more the size of Kmart. But remember: Groceries are exempt from sales tax. So there wouldn’t be much hit on the city treasury.

The Not-So-Silent Second

Remember when the rule of thumb was your house should cost three times your annual income? In Ventura today, the average house costs ten times the average household income. If you already own a house, you’re probably okay. But if you’re a young family – or you live somewhere else and you get a job here – it’s almost impossible to buy a house.

This is not only a problem for families – it’s also a problem for businesses. If the people who work for you can’t afford to buy a house in the community where you’re located, they’ll probably leave. At best, they’ll commute long distances, creating traffic congestion and environmental damage.

It’s a problem for small businesses like the one I run, which has seven employees. It’s also a problem for big organizations that employ hundreds of people, like the City of Ventura. The truth of the matter is that our community isn’t going to be competitive – and organizations large and small can’t do their job well – if people can’t afford to live in Ventura.

Last Monday night, the City Council unanimously approved one of the most important new initiatives to come forth since I was elected almost four years ago: the Employee Housing Assistance Program. It’s a simple, low-risk, and inexpensive way for the city to help city employees buy houses here in Ventura – an important element in “recruiting and retaining” good city employees. Just as important, it lays the foundation for a communitywide effort that would allow all employers – large and small – to do the same thing. Already, our city’s Housing Authority and Community Memorial Hospital have expressed interest in joining the program.

The concept is deceptively simple. You might call it a “not so silent” second mortgage. An employee qualifies for a mortgage. The employer puts up the collateral for an interest-only second mortgage and then pays the interest. The bottom line: The homebuyer’s monthly payment on a $450,000 mortgage debt is cut from $3,000 to $2,000 a month.

Too good to be true? Not really. Here are a few more details:

-- The employer isn’t really out the cost of the mortgage. It’s only collateral. The employer pays the interest on the second mortgage, but that cost is defrayed by the fact that the employer can still invest the cash. When the house is sold or refinanced, the employer gets the money back – with the interest.

On Monday night, the City Council approved $2 million for the program. But that’s not tax money the city is spending. That’s money the city already has in its investment portfolio that has simply been pledged against the employee’s mortgage. The $2 million will still be in the city’s investment portfolio, accumulating interest. The net annual cost to an employer like the city is estimated to be $3,000.

The program can provide a lot of help even for people who don’t make a lot of money. Virtually all full-time employees at the city are eligible for a second mortgage of $150,000.

At the city government, the lowest-paid full-time employees make about $13 to $14 an hour. You may think somebody making that kind of money would never be able to afford a house. But if two working adults make that amount, their household income is somewhere around $55,000 – enough to qualify for a mortgage of around $275,000-$300,000. Add the $150,000 second, and even people with modest incomes are back in the housing market.

And best of all: This program doesn’t have to be limited only to city employees. It can be opened up to anybody whose employer is willing to participate in the program. Right now the program will be run by the city, but as more and more employers join, it will probably be spun off into a separate entity.

The city has been in discussions with many large employers about participating – not just Community Memorial and the Housing Authority but also the county, Ventura College (which spoke in favor of the idea Monday night), Patagonia, and the school district. We’ve also been working with the Chamber of Commerce on ways to bring this program to small employers as well.

That’s good news for small business owners, like me. In my day job, I am fortunate to attract some of the most talented and promising young people in the country to work for me. But they almost always leave, usually because of housing price. I’d like to find ways to keep them in Ventura long-term, and as an employer I look forward to working with the Chamber on being a small-business participant in this program.

Thanks to Mayor Morehouse and especially Councilmember Neal Andrews for promoting and crafting the program as members of the Workforce Housing Ad Hoc committee. This is the most important step we’ve ever taken to “recruit and retain” good employees – not just at City Hall, but everywhere in our city.

A Neighborhood For The Future

On Saturday I went to the grand opening of Citrus Walk, the new subdivision located off Henderson Road along Highway 126 in East Ventura. It was a good place to see the future, and how all the Monday-night brawls over real estate development projects can help to shape that future.

This project was built by The Olson Co. on the Hailes Ranch, a 40-acre site formerly owned by the school district. When it’s completed, the project will consist of 232 dwelling units on about 40 acres, ranging from 1,300-square-foot triplexes (on the market at $450,000) to 3,000-square-foot single-family homes (clocking in at around $800,000).

There was a pretty fair brawl over the project itself and the site plan. Olson proposed a mostly single-family project with some multi-family, while many neighbors wanted entirely detachd single-family homes. After Olson and the neighbors reached an agreement, the city staff and eventually the City Council called for a different site plan – one that created more of a mix of dwellings, along with more usable open space including a one-acre park that many of the dwellings overlook. We also created larger one-story ranch-style homes on larger lots along the perimeter of the project adjacent to existing neighborhoods. For all these reasons, Citrus Walk will be one of the few neighborhoods in Ventura where you can “move up” without “moving out”.

On Saturday, I saw the payoff. Ventura is a city that is rapidly aging and we always hear that young families and the middle class are getting priced out. Yet on Saturday I saw all kinds of people. Lots of young families of all races and ethnicities – some couples with children and some where the wives were very pregnant. But also lots of empty nesters.

Not all these folks will buy in Citrus Walk, of course. A lot of the people I talked to are also looking RiverPark in Oxnard. But many of these folks, especially the young families, will buy. And that means many people who work in Ventura, who are raising families, and want to make a life here will have a place to live – some in larger houses they can “move up” to, others in starter dwellings that are a little less expensive. And those in the starter dwellings will be able to move up as their incomes grow while still living in a neighborhood – with a park – that they will probably come to think of as home.

We often kick around what we mean by “smart growth.” Mostly what I mean is building neighborhoods that make sense for families to live in given both the financial and social demands we face today. In Citrus Walk, we’ll see lots of different types of people living in the same neighborhood. We’ll see young families finding a place to live in Ventura with the ability to move up in the same neighborhood. All these things are to the good. And they wouldn’t not be possible if we were still pursuing conventional suburban development.

Score one for smart growth.

I'm Running

• I’m running.
  
  I can’t believe it’s been four years – almost to the day – since I first announced my candidacy for the Ventura City Council. Four years is an eternity in politics. But it’s not a very long time when you’re trying to assist your community to become a better place. That’s why I’ve decided to seek re-election this fall.
  
  We’ve accomplished a lot, but there is a great deal more to do. We have begun to “raise the bar” in every area of life in Ventura – but we are not done.
  
  It’s been my great privilege to serve all of you as a member of the City Council since you first elected me in 2003. I ran because I felt City Hall was out of touch with our community and I thought I could help restore a bond of trust between the community and our city government. I also thought I could help “raise the bar” on a variety of issues, especially planning and development.
  
  I’ve tried very hard to be responsive to every constituent and thoughtful about every issue. This isn’t always easy. As a member of the City Council, I have 106,000 constituents. And my colleagues and I get flooded with different issues concerning our city every Monday night – not just planning but budgeting, litigation, public works projects, union contracts, partnerships with nonprofit organizations, environmental issues, and on and on. I’m amazed at how much there is to do.
  
  I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished in the last four years. Our community is a different place today than it was in 2003. Here are some examples:
  
  Four years ago, our city had a $9 million budget deficit. Today our budget is balanced. As the City Council’s liaison to the Ventura Auto Center, I am proud that we have increased dealerships, sales, and tax revenue in the last four years so that we are running even with our counterparts in Oxnard.
  
  Four years ago, our hillsides were still at risk for major development. Today they are designated as open space in our General Plan and we have a robust local organization, the Ventura Hillsides Conservancy, working to protect the hillsides forever.
  
  Four years ago, our community’s trust in City Hall was at an all-time low. Today, more than 80% of Ventura residents say they trust the city government and like what we’re doing.
  
  Four years ago, our community was riven – as it had been for decades – over divisive questions about growth and development. Today, thanks to our all-infill General Plan, we are largely in agreement about how and where to grow.
  
  
  Four years ago, we weren’t even addressing the pressing questions concerning public safety in our community. Today, we are about to add police officers and firefighters to our city force for the first time in almost two decades.
  
  These are significant accomplishments. But there is more to do. If you choose to re-elect me to the City Council, I will devote the next four years to finishing the job I’ve started, so that Ventura will continue to be a great place to life in the future.
  
  With that in mind, here are my priorities for the next four years heading into this election:
  
  
  1. Finish the job on prosperity and public safety
  
  When I ran in 2003, I said that prosperity and public safety are intertwined. You can’t have a prosperous community if it is not safe; and you can’t afford the cost of public safety if your community is not prosperous. Over the next four years, I will work to increase our city’s tax revenues by encouraging appropriate new business, and I will work to use those increased tax revenues to further expand our public safety force.
  
  
  2. Finish the job of requiring high-quality new development and historic preservation
  
  We have made great strides in the last four years on the issue of growth and development. We have committed ourselves to land preservation and focusing on infill development. But we still have not completed the job of requiring high-quality development 100% of the time, so that everyone will benefit from the new growth that we do approve. I am committed to “raising the bar” even more on new development. This means not only requiring high-quality new development, but improving our sensitivity to existing neighborhood conditions and historic preservation.
  
  
  3. Finish the job of protecting the hillsides
  
  Our 2005 General Plan removed the Ventura Hillsides from the path of growth by re-designating the hillside area as open space rather than residential. But virtually all of the hillside land is still in the hands of private landowners. Over the next four years I will work with the city, the Ventura Hillsides Conservancy, the Trust for Public Lands, and other conservation organizations to purchase the hillsides so they can be restored ecologically and opened for recreational use.
  
  
  4. Finish the job of “greening” Ventura
  
  Ventura is already one of the most environmentally progressive cities in California. But there is so much more to do to make our community truly “green” – increasing recycling, restoring our barrancas, improving our stormwater runoff so our ocean is always clean, leading the way on conservation so that we simply don’t use as much electricity or gasoline or water as we do today. I am committed to working with my colleagues to make Ventura even greener than it already is.
  
  
  5. Finish the job of providing workforce housing
  
  Housing is so expensive in Ventura that many of the people who work here cannot afford to live here. This leads to commuting, overcrowding, and the loss of a “sense of community”. The city has been working with developers and other large employers to provide more workforce housing – housing available to the people who work in our community rather than commuters. I will continue to work with my colleagues and other organizations in Ventura to expand workforce housing opportunities in Ventura.
  
  
  6. Finish the job of engaging our neighborhoods in our governance
  
  Four years ago I promised that I would work with Ventura’s neighborhoods to find new and important ways for them to be involved in the governance of their communities and our city overall. I am sorry to say that we have not made as much progress on this front as I would like. While the city now does a better job of reaching out to community groups, we still have not found a strong and consistent way to engage our neighborhoods in the governance of our community. Over the next four years, I will work to find innovative and important ways to strengthen the bond between the city government and the neighborhoods so that everyone is involved in governing our town.
  
  
  List of Endorsements
  
  I’m very grateful for the broad and deep support within the community. Here is a list of community leaders who have already agreed to endorse me. We’ll keep adding to this list as the campaign goes on. Titles are for identification purposes only and do not suggest support from the organizations identified.
  
  Organizations
  Ventura Citizens for Hillside Preservation
  
  Individuals
  Brian Brennan, former mayor of Ventura
  Greg Carson, former mayor of Ventura
  Ivor Davis, president of the Ventura Music Festival, and Sally Ogle Davis
  Jill Bangser Fioravanti, Midtown resident and Housing Authority Commissioner
  Lauri Flack, founder of the Westside Community Council
  Dan Frederickson, Downtown resident and investor
  Jim Friedman, former mayor of Ventura
  Debbie Golden, Ventura Unified School District Trustee
  Mary Haffner, Ventura Unified School District Trustee
  Erika Harding, musician and small business owner
  Mark Hartley, Pierpont resident and Downtown investor
  Bill and Rose Hayden Smith, Midtown residents
  John Hecht, Ventura Planning Commissioner
  John Keats, M.D.
  Ed and Susan Lacy, community activists
  Marie Lakin, parent and community activist
  Dan Long, Midtown resident
  Carl Morehouse, Mayor of Ventura
  Pedro Nava, California State Assemblymember
  Hugh Oliver, Midtown resident and hillside activist
  M.L. Peterson, Ventura County School Board Member
  Steve Schafer, Midtown resident and historic preservation activist
  Roy Schneider, M.D.
  Mel Sheeler, former chair, Greater V entura chamber of Commerce
  Sandy Smith, former mayor of Ventura
  Ed Summers, Ventura City Councilmember
  Nan Waltman, Livable Ventura
  Chuck Watson, former director, Interface Family Services
  Christy Weir, Deputy Mayor of Ventura
  

Playing the Retail Game

I’m all retailed out.

For the past three days I have spent almost all of my time at on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center, talking to retailers, brokers, real estate developers, and lots of other folks who are engaged in the business of figuring out where retail stores will be located and how shopping centers will look in the future.

The convention I'm attending on behalf of the city – the 50th annual convention of the International Congress of Shopping Centers (ICSC) -- is huge. Think three or four Pacific View Malls, swarming with half the population of Ventura. It’s so big that the convention center has streets with names – 20th Avenue, D Street – and the biggest retailers and developers have special business cards made up with their Convention Center address on them. Constantly walking from one end of the convention to the other is kind of like – well, kind of like going to the mall.

The main purpose of the convention is for shopping center owners and retail stores to “do deals” with each other on shopping center leases. It’s said that billions of dollars changes hands every year at ICSC. Increasingly, however, cities like Ventura participate too. Last year was the first year we came to ICSC; this year was the first year we had a booth. Deputy Mayor Christy Weir has been here with me, as has Sid White, the city’s Economic Development Manager. City Manager Rick Cole was here on Monday.

Why do we bother? Suffice is to say that as an elected official, you can’t do your job well if you don’t understand retail trends and how they affect your town and your finances.

Sales tax is very important to our city budget, and retail stores are very important to our economic development strategy all over town, from downtown to the auto centers.. Hotels are important to our city and our budget as well – we are a tourist town, after all, and hotel developers and operators also participate in ICSC. This year, Jim Luttjohann, the head of our visitor and convention bureau, came with us and he’s been great at dealing with the hotel people.

In 3½ years in office, I’ve learned that you can’t sit back and wait for retailers to come to you – but by the same token you can’t simply give them everything they ask for, either. You have to know what you want and be aggressive in finding the developers and retailers who can help you meet your goals (and also be aggressive in deciding what retailers and what business deals you don't want). But you also have to know the market and the trends, because your goals have to be realistic. In other words, you have to be very, very savvy about what’s going on. And because retailing is so faddish, you have to work constantly to stay current.

So we’ve spent a lot of time talking to shopping center developers and owners. For example, ICSC is the best time to talk to higher-ups at MaceRich, which owns Pacific View Mall. The convention is a good place to target retailers and hotels that we think we might want in Ventura and understand how they do business. We’ve talked to a lot of people, for example, about the retail opportunities that exist on the vacant land at the Ventura Auto Center. (Representatives of the Auto Center’s landowners, Hofer Enterprises, have also been here this week.)

Most of all, we’ve soaked up knowledge just by being around. There’s a lot of talk about mixed use. It has become a popular topic here at ICSC in the last couple of years, and we’ve had a fair amount of traffic at our booth from people who are interested in it. And even though most of the retailers represented here are national chains, there’s more and more talk about local businesses that can complement the chains in downtowns, at malls, and even at strip shopping centers.

Unlike the retailers and the shopping center owners, we at the city don’t come home with “deals in the bag”. But we do come home with leads, insight, and a stronger sense of the kinds of strategic decisions we have to make to stay competitive and use retailing to create a better community. And retailers and developers all over the country go home with a better sense of what kind of a community Ventura is and how to provide us with the retail and mixed-use developments we want.

Cleaning Up The Planning Process

We’re approving projects too fast.
We’re not approving them fast enough.
They’re too dense.
They’re not dense enough.
We’re wasting too much money on planning studies.
We’re not doing enough planning studies.

In the typical week, I hear all these complaints – and many more, equally contradictory – about how our planning process works. And they’re all true.

That is to say, they’re all true sometimes.

The City Council and the staff have spent a lot of time lately trying to sort out what’s going on with our planning and development review processes and how to improve them. After 3½ years on the Council, I wish I could say that we have it all figured it out. We don’t. But – I always seem to say this – we’re trying, and we’re making progress. Let me talk first about the meeting last Monday, where we looked at the planning process, and then the meeting a week ago Monday, where we again talked about Saticoy & Wells.

Last Monday night (May 7), our planning staff presented us with an update on how our planning processes are doing and where the bottlenecks appear to be. I have to say that this was one of the best-thought-out presentations I’ve seen since I’ve been on the Council. I came away it realizing that the problem is not that our planning processes are too long or too short – have too many steps or too few. Rather, the problem, all too often, is that we don’t quite know what we want, and we don’t discipline ourselves up-front to clarify (1) what we want, and (2) whether the project in front of us is giving us what we want.

The basis of the report was a pretty intimidating-looking flow chart that tracked absolutely everything we do in planning – from Advance Planning, where our staff draws up plans; to Current Planning, where we process development projects; to Land Engineering, where final plans are approved after the project itself has been OK’d. Even though the flow chart is complicated, just working it through made me see the process much better.

For example, most projects go to the Design Review Committee for conceptual review and then, later, for detailed design review. This makes sense – except it happens before the project goes to the Planning Commission. So if the Planning Commission raises a significant issue about the size or scale of a project, they are accused of holding up the process, because the applicant has spent a lot of time and money getting to that point. This creates a kind of juggernaut effect for a project – by the time it gets to decision-makers, it’s hard to stop or change significantly. An exception here is the Housing Approval Program, where projects get a combined DRC/Planning Commission pre-screen before detailed design.

Similarly, the flow chart made it clear that there are at least three different points at which historic preservation issues could be considered – at an early conceptual review by the Historic Preservation Committee, during the CEQA process, and at the more typical hearing in front of the HPC late in the process. When I asked the staff how we decide whether and when to use any of these opportunities, they made it clear that they are confused and they want direction from us. OK, message received – thanks to clear presentation.

Even so, I have to say that things in Current Planning have been moving well in recent months. Week after week, it has seemed, some developer has come before either the Planning Commission and the City Council complaining that their project has been in process for three years or five years or something. My point in response is that these projects are now coming forward because the logjam has been broken.

It’s no accident that these projects are coming forward after being delayed. We have better staff leadership determined to move them forward. We are more clear in our direction and projects are closer to what we want and we are approving them. Even developers have a hard time grasping this – listen to us, do what we say, and your project will get approved..

The most recent example was Aldea Hermosa, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. There was a stutter-step in front of the Council, but the Council made its direction clear: Redesign the project so that no lots were less than 40 feet wide. The vote on this was 5-1. This required a redesign that cost the developer 3 houses. The developer tried to meet with each councilmember in an attempt to bring back their previous design – essentially, to get the council to overturn its decision. This didn’t work. When the redesigned project came back five weeks later, and the Council’s concerns had been addressed, the project was approved 7-0 with no discussion. See? Follow our direction and we can move forward.

A week ago Monday (April 30), we had another workshop (jointly with the Planning Commission) on the Saticoy & Wells Community Plan. The intent here was to have a more in-depth discussion about three items that we had flagged a few months before – parks, agricultural buffers, and retail. After talking with the school district, the staff added a fourth topic to the workshop – schools. This whole discussion was a good example of how difficult it can be to draft a good plan up-front – and how important it is to do so.

We’re doing a Community Plan for Saticoy & Wells because there are currently four large projects on the books that would essentially build out the area by adding another 2,000 or so housing units. Each developer was moving forward individually and we wanted them to work together, so that, for example, their neighborhoods could be interconnected. (The “go it alone” mentality of our local developers in, in my opinion, a legacy of our Residential Growth Management Program, which pitted developers against each other for allocations, rather than encouraging them to work together to create better neighborhoods.)

To me, another important reason to do Community Plans is to make sure that we can work together with the developers to make sure that we get the infrastructure and community facilities we need to serve the community – streets, schools, parks, libraries, etc. In the case of Saticoy & Wells, the city had had some discussions about parks with the developers – individually and collectively – but we had not looked at the “big picture” of what the parks system in the area would look like. We concluded that, generally, the parks as proposed met the standard for park space in our General Plan, but we referred some specific issues about parks policy in the Community Plan to the Parks & Recreation Commission, which took these matters up on tonight (Wednesday, May 9th.)

At the same time, the staff met with the school district and came forward with some concerns about schools. To wit: The buildout of Saticoy & Wells would likely generate more than 900 students. The school district says it needs an elementary school and probably also a contribution to a middle school – the closest middle school is Balboa, near the Government Center. And so far, the 4 large development proposals don’t address schools at all.

After the schools issue was brought up, some of the developers complained about a “late hit” – shocked that this issue would be brought up so late in the process. But if schools aren’t deal with pro-actively now, they’ll have to be dealt with in an even more desperate way later. The school district will eventually collect school impact fees, but these won’t be enough to cover the cost of the schools, and the Environmental Impact Report will identify a school deficit. Then the school district and the city will be scrambling to try to make the best of the situation, and the developers will be even further down the line.

So we referred the school issue to the city-school liaison committee – a group consisting of two councilmembers and two school board members – so that the city and the school district can talk with the developers about how best to resolve the issue and provide us with policy recommendations for the Community Plan. The liaison committee is a “Brown Act” committee whose meetings are public and noticed in advance, so any member of the community should be able to attend these meetings.

If this sounds like doing planning inside out, upside down, and backwards, it is. When I took office in late 2003, the four developers will already under way with their plans and had strong expectations of being able to move through the process independent of one another. Yet these major issues – and many others -- had not been addressed.

As a council, we faced three choices. We could have allowed all the projects to go forward separately, which means we never would have gotten the public infrastructure and community facilities we need. We could have put all the developers on hold while we did the plan, which would have sent the message, once again, that we are totally anti-development. Or we could have tried to craft the overall policies for the area that the developers needed to adhere to while at the same time moving the projects forward as best we can. This is what we have done.

The Community Plan process has not been perfect. We’ve had a number of excellent workshops, and both staff and consultants have done excellent work. But in the draft plan up to this point, we haven’t dealt with a lot of core issues – infrastructure and facilities. I think this is partly because, as I said before, we’re “out of practice” with community planning because of the RGMP. (And even when we try to address the issues, we’re not always clear; some council members, our senior staff, and Parks & Rec Commissioners spent a good deal of time early this week trying to interpret exactly what we asked Parks & Rec to do.) On Saticoy & Wells, there’s a certain amount of “muddling through” we are going to have to do to wind up with not only a good set of projects but also a fine community as well. It won’t always be pretty, but we will do it in the end.

But I have to say that I think both the council and the staff is learning. At last Monday’s council meeting, Nelson Hernandez, our Community Development Director, said that in future community plans – beginning with the North Avenue plan, which is next – the staff will prepare a list of all possible aspects of the plan (and their cost) and discuss with the council what the scope should be.

When I ran in 2003, I said over and over again that mistakes were inevitable and instead of being afraid to admit them (as was the case at City Hall at the time, at least in my estimation), we had to be able to acknowledge them and learn from them. We’re doing that now, and the planning and development process is getting better as a result.