View the latest newsletter at https://mailchi.mp/3bdcff6c3a2f/february-events-city-council-updates-13541712
Upcoming Events
Wednesday March 22, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm, CACC
The College Area Community Council meets online on the fourth Wednesday of the month, from 7 to 9 pm. This month’s guests include Steve Schafer of the San Buenaventura Conservancy, who will be talking about historical preservation, and Peter Shedayi from the city’s Public Works Department. Visit CACCVentura.com for the agenda & Zoom link.
Thursday March 23, 10:30am: Ribbon cutting at Mobil Gas at Main & Mills
A family owned business, it has been closed for over a year for renovations, much longer than they had anticipated.
Friday March 24, 9:30-10:30am: Discussion about roads and potholes at La Parrilla
Join me for breakfast and a discussion about our streets at La Parrilla in the Ashwood Shopping Center. Ride the bus or walk and I’ll buy you some tasty hash browns!
Thursday March 30, 2:30pm: Chat at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf
Meet me at the Coffee Bean at 1780 S. Victoria to talk about city business. If you ride the bus (or walk) I’ll buy you a cup of tea!
Saturday April 8, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm, Second Saturday Cleanup
Join me for a couple hours of cleaning up District 3. We’ll pick up trash, remove stickers, and deal with graffiti. I’ll bring a bunch of supplies, but you can bring your own. We’ll meet at the CVS at Victoria & Telegraph. We do this each Second Saturday at different locations within the district and have cleaned up maybe a ton of trash and hundreds and hundreds of graffiti tags and stickers.
Note: I serve on the board of Gold Coast Transit. When I say “ride the bus or walk,” that’s what I mean. It’s great if you ride a bike, or horse, or a pogo stick, but I’m not buying you a beer for that. This is about getting butts on buses.
Council Updates
Potholes come up in every discussion. We have a crew tasked with filling potholes, but they can’t fill a pothole until it dries out. With the constant barrage of storms, new potholes are showing up existing potholes getting worse, while we wait for a break in the weather. So we are stepping up our efforts. Last week, additional Public Works employees were assigned to filling potholes, and we’re hiring a contractor as well, all as part of a city-wide pothole blitz. I’m sorry things have gotten so bad. Over the last three years we spent about $7.5 million in street resurfacing. Over the next three years, we’ll spend $15 million. On March 24, I’ll be at La Parrilla eating breakfast and talking about potholes. See the calendar above for details.
Reminder: You should file a claim if a pothole damages your car or bike. https://www.cityofventura.ca.gov/155/Claim-Form You can report a pothole by calling the city at 805-652-4590 (texting doesn’t work with that) or by texting me at 805-515-6839, and I’ll pass it along.
The findings of the Special Audit will be presented at the Council meeting on Monday, March 20. The findings are vague. While the point was never to be discussing any particular employee at a Council meeting, I was hoping for some more detail about where things went wrong. The most concerning issue is the use of CalCards — those are city credit cards — for non-meal/non-travel expenses. 33% of those transactions were out of compliance, with the note that they “primarily comprise office supplies and information technology.” I’d like to know more about the ones that weren’t. Most importantly, I need to know when and how the prohibited purchases were caught.
Last year, I identified about two dozen violations of our Local Meal policy by our former City Manager over a twelve month period. The special audit didn’t, as far as I can tell, look at those sorts of violations. That said, I dug into the CalCard records of over a dozen employees, and the only violations I saw of this policy were by the City Manager. The former City Manager.
Spanish Language Interpretation will continue at City Council meetings for the next six months, and we’ll begin publishing agendas in Spanish. Kudos to Interim City Manager Akbar Alikhan and City Clerk Michael MacDonald for their hard work on this!
The city accepted a SAFER grant for 13 firefighters paramedics. The positions will mean at least one additional full-time roving engine. What I’m excited about is, it will also include a paramedic squad. The vast majority of our FD calls are medical calls, and I’ve advocated for piloting paramedic squads: two firefighter paramedics on a truck, rather than three on an engine, and a base for them doesn’t have to be a fire station. The downside is, it’s a three year grant. We’ll reapply in the future but the best we can hope for is they’ll fund some of the 13 positions for the following three years, and that will happen only if the city also steps up and directs more resources to the Fire Department.
We finally passed a city-wide Inclusionary Housing Ordinance in February. Finally, apartments built outside of downtown will be required to include 15% Affordable units, or pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit in in-lieu fees. I’ve been engaged in this issue since 2017, and right after being elected I convinced my colleagues to make the IHO a priority and have one adopted by the end of 2020. Staff just didn’t have the bandwidth to get it done then. But it’s done now.
Unfunded pension liabilities threaten the long term future of the city, as we carry hundreds of millions of dollars of loans to cover them, at an interest rate nearing 7%. On pension issues, we rank in the bottom third of state; we rank well in other categories, but overall, the pension issues put us in the middle. Here’s a map from the state auditor of overall financial risk. Obviously, we want to be in the green:
Last year, we took the unprecedented step (for us, at least) of adopting a policy that 90% of year-end surpluses will go to paying down our unfunded liabilities. So last month, that meant we put $10 million towards paying it down.
Council will soon decide whether to pursue federal WIFIA Loans to pay half of the $350 million WaterPure Project. For years, WIFIA loans were attractive because the rate on them was 1.85%. Today they’re about 4%. Coupled with the ever-increasing budget of the WaterPure project, it means even more rate increases. Council already programmed in 7% increases for the next five years. After those five years, the annual increases could be a few points higher.
If you’d like to discuss anything here, or a topic I didn’t cover, I encourage you to come to one of my get-togethers. I vary the day and the time and the locale so I hope one will work for you!
Be well,
Mike