Your Courteous Tattler City Council Meeting Preview Report

We must be well into 2012 now because the first City Council meeting is coming up tomorrow night. I don't know how you feel about this kind of stuff, but for me this is great theater. I have come to enjoy the time I spend at these meetings, and I suspect you would as well should you decide to attend. Trust me, much of the visceral appeal is lost when you watch it at home on television. Nothing beats being there in person.

There is also this. Having decided that blogging is so much more rewarding than running for City Council, I now have the luxury of not just writing about anything I feel like, but this time around I can also endorse all five of the candidates currently running for these three seats. With more to come, I'm sure. Makes very little sense I know, but its just the kind of freedom that I need right now. I've been feeling a little tense lately. It might be from the lack of rain, or something.

For the purposes of today's article I would like to thank Chris Koerber's City Council campaign people for posting City Staff reports for this week's meeting on their campaign website. As you might recall, we the taxpayers paid $40,000 months ago to make this kind of information available on the City of Sierra Madre website, but for whatever reason that has yet to happen. The City Manager has told us that this momentous event won't take place until next April which, as I am sure you know, is when the City Council election is happening. You'd think for that kind of dough the simple task of loading documents onto a website wouldn't be such a big deal. But you know how complicated these folks can be, I'm sure.

On Chris Koerber's campaign website this elusive practice is described thusly:

City Docs: Index to Sierra Madre City Documents - The City of Sierra Madre refuses to put official city documents such as staff reports and minutes online so citizens know what they are up to. Here you can find the latest documents to determine what the city council is doing in your name.

This is a great service and personally it spared me the necessity of having to schlep down to the Library and shovel quarters into their copying machine. Instead I just printed out what I needed right here in the comfort of my home. You can access this week's City Council meeting Staff Report (and much more) by clicking here.

The meeting kicks off with the usual rituals and proclamations of our city government's great value to the community. A high standard that most of the Councilmembers do not live up to, and prove it within the first few minutes of the meeting during something known as the "Mayor and City Council Reports." Most people time their arrival at City Council meetings so that they'll miss this part of the meeting.

Money will be spent, of course. And since there hasn't been any City Council meetings since late last year, the need to spend has been pent up a little. Which is reflected in that $1,252,723.82 figure. This includes everything from CRA (RIP) bond service payments to the financial requirements of the Library. With employee salaries taking up the lion's share of the haul.

Consent Calendar Agenda Item 1d sounds kind of mysterious, at least until you read the Staff Report on the matter. Entitled "Adoption of the City of Sierra Madre Classification Plan," what it deals with is trying to figure out who in City Hall does what job. This might seems like a simple matter, but apparently it took a rather pricey consultant to untangle things down there. I used to work for a company where the boss refused to give anyone titles because he felt that it would make people believe they were too good to pick up a broom and sweep. With Agenda Item 1d the folks at City Hall are apparently going in the opposite managerial direction.

Also on the Consent Calendar is resolution 12-02 "Establishing an Arts Advisory Committee to the Community Services Commission." Also known as Agenda Item 1e, this is a bit of a step down from a time not too long ago when The Arts had a soapbox all their own, which was called the "Community Arts Commission." Its denouement was a matter of some controversy, and I suspect there is at least a possibility of some pungent public comment on the matter. Or so I hope. Arts people should always be passionate about things that are important to them. It is a trait that differentiates them from most everyone else.

Item #2 calls for the creation of a Community Facilities District to fund storm sewers and the like in the Stonegate settlement. Which, if I am not mistaken, is for the most part One Carter, the development where no houses have ever been built. This involves the creation of a tax, and therefore requires the vote of the residents up there to fund "Stonegate Drainage." But like I said, since no houses have ever been built at "Stonegate" in more than 7 years, I am not sure certain who is actually going to vote or be taxed.

Item #3 should be a pip because it involves the gargantuan Meaglia project that was mercifully shot down by the Planning Commission just before the Christmas break. This "5,824 square foot single family" monument to uncouth materialism would, if allowed, tower mightily over its neighborhood, blocking both the sun and views of many of those unfortunate enough to share space with this LULU (Locally Unwanted Land Usage). Despite the apparent fast track this project was put on after its Planning Commission defeat, it appears that City Staff is recommending "that the City Council deny the appeal and uphold the decision of the Planning Commission." This would include denying the Meaglias their CUP. My take is the Meaglias are small fish and the City Council will see little loss in summarily rejecting their appeal. Their project being no Kensington.

Item #4 deals with water conservation, and is actually a little wild. The idea behind this one is that the need to conserve water could become so acute sometime in the future that serious measures to deal with scofflaws would be needed. The impression I get being that the City feels they need some alternatives with real teeth to them, otherwise residents will just ignore them no matter how hard they plead with people to not use too much water. Here are the penalties:

A) For the first violation ... a surcharge penalty is imposed in the amount of twice the current water rate.

B) For the second violation ... a penalty equal to one hundred percent of the penalty set forth in subsection A of this section is imposed.

C) For the third violation ... a water restrictor shall be installed behind the water meter.

My misgiving here is that, like traffic tickets, this could end up being just another way for the City to raise more money. It is reasonable to impose penalties for hogging up a lot of water during a time of severe shortages, but who is it that would establish the thresholds for such monetary penalties? Would violations be something rare, or will the system be rigged so that penalties are widespread and hit the water bills of many Sierra Madre residents often? Unless properly administered a potential for abuse is definitely there.

And ask yourself this, would you willingly give the power to impose financial penalties to the same people who falsely told you the water rate increase was due to the need for infrastructure repair? We certainly do not need another rate hike, disguised or otherwise.

Item # 5 deals with the appointment of a youth member to the Community Services Commission. There is one slot and two applicants. To put it in Thunderdome terms, two walk in, one walks out.

Item #6 is where the City Council will discuss its appointments to the Utility Users Tax Oversight Committee. I hope I am not being too unkind about this, but in my mind this has a lot more to do with selling the latest utility tax increase than any actual citizen control over how that money will be spent. When this Committee was originally trotted out in 2008 the idea was that watchdog citizenry would monitor how the money from the Utility User Tax increase was being spent by the City. This being considered necessary because these new funds were thought to be only available for Police salary increases and costs associated with public safety issues. Therefore the UUT Oversight Committee was charged with determining that none of this money was used for anything else.

However, it is now known that the UUT is a General Fund tax, and the money can be used for anything the City Council desires. And that the whole "public safety" meme being plastered all over the campaign to raise our UUT rates once again (and this time to a guaranteed 12%) is merely a sales pitch designed to suck in the poorly informed.

With the return of the UUT Oversight Committee we are once again being told that in effect we have the power to make certain these new tax revenues are spent on appropriate public safety items. Which is absurd when you consider that there is no legal basis requiring that this money be spent that way.

How about we forego this powerless vanity advisory UUT committee and instead legally ensure that this money is spent in exactly the same way this tax increase is being sold to the public?

Item #7 is all about the submission of arguments for and against the Utility User Tax increase, and how they will read when included in the election notice. You may recall that at the last such meeting Mayor Buchanan bristled upon hearing it suggested that his inclusion of the words "paramedics" and "emergency services" in the ballot language was deceptive because this proposed tax increase has little specifically to do with such things. Rather it is a General Tax and the money can be used for Miller Lite and Slim Jims if that is what the Council later desires. Buchanan's approach being more of a sales pitch than any honest appraisal of the true nature of this utility tax increase.

There is also the matter of a 12% UUT being way out of line with what other cities are paying. At that 12% figure our UUT rate would be by far the highest in the entire state.

Hopefully whoever is writing the argument against this tax increase will point out how bogus Buchanan's claims are here. If you are going to ask people for more of their money, you should at least level with them. The deadline for the submittal of arguments is January 17th.

Item #8 sounds momentous, and it is. This is the requirement that the City Council either appoint a successor agency to the soon to be disbanded Sierra Madre Community Redevelopment Agency, or turn Sierra Madre's CRA obligations over to the mercy of the County of Los Angeles. Which sounds pretty frightening to me. Chances are about 100% that the City Council will vote itself the successor agency just so that they might have some say in how things will go during Sacramento's "big clawback."

And how will these things go you ask? It won't be easy for them. One of the earliest obligations will be to establish something called a "Redevelopment Obligation Retirement Fund." Which I suspect will include dealing with things like all that bond debt we incurred around the time Sierra Madre sold its eternal soul for some property tax money to build City Hall and the Fire/PD Department building back in the 1970s.

It has been estimated that the entire bond debt of all 400 soon to be disbanded CRAs combined is at around $30 billion dollars. And now that all needs to be paid back. Ours, too. Get the "For Sale" signs ready,

Item #9 is the upteenth receive and file recommendation for the Sep 20 Strategic Plan Retreat report. If you are attending the meeting and have made it this far this should be your signal that it is time to go home and get some sleep.

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