Meeting on Hawaiian Gardens

This has been a very busy week. Thursday 50 residents or so showed up at Newcomb Academy to learn about what the City of Hawaiian Gardens is planning on doing by connecting 226th Street to Pioneer Blvd.

Basically, HG wants to remove a portion of the cinder block fence and a mature tree that blocks the view of traffic on the Long Beach side. They also want to install a 3 way stop on the Long Beach side to keep traffic controlled out of Long Beach so cars don't crash into cars going east to west on 226th Street.

Sadly, no one from Hawaiian Gardens was in attendance , although they had promised to be there.

It was the consensus of the residents for Long Beach to officially oppose HG doing anything in Long Beach and to request they move their connection of 226th north of where planned to eliminate the danger of on-coming traffic from Long Beach.

One attendee asked if we could do a traffic count at the point of where Pioneer Blvd., leaves LB and becomes HG just to see whether or not the traffic comes from the north or the south.

Everyone agreed that the City of LB needs to fix up the LB side -- the sidewalk is broken and so is the fence. Also several residents asked if the city could extend up the wall behind their homes and make the fence look uniform.

I am looking into all of this and will keep you updated as we find out more.

Thanks to Mark Christoffels, our City Engineer for attending and answering questions.

Meeting on DeMille

Sorry to say that the Long Beach Unified School District could not find anyone to attend the community meeting held last night to discuss the proposed conversion of DeMille Middle School to a high school. I know there are graduations this week, but honestly, I cannot believe that LBUSD facilities management hands out diplomas. Someone should have been there from the school district to provide an update.

That being said, the City Traffic Engineer, Dave Roseman, did an excellent job explaining some of the potential traffic problems that actually exist today and would be made worse if more traffic trips were generated by a high school population.

I had to remind the 7o residents plus in attendance not to "shoot the messenger." As Roseman pointed out, LBSUD has no legal requirement to discuss the plan or the traffic impact with the City of Long Beach because they are governed by the Board of Education (5 members elected by the voters of Long Beach, Lakewood, Signal Hill and Avalon) and the State and County Department of Education.

I am compiling the commments made by participants last night and will foward them with another request to the LBUSD to hold community meetings with residents to provide updates. Afterall, not one person in attendance in the December 2008 meeting received a response from the LBUSD to the questions they wrote on the cards provided by school district staff.

Legal requirements aside. It is not being a "good neighbor" to ignore the good neighbors who live across the street from the project site.

Who Should Fix Potholes?

Read a very interesting article today in "Governing" magazine which is published by Congressional Quarterly. The article is written by Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene and looks at the debate of whether or not it saves money for cities to contract out work.

What they found was that it is actually more expensive to contract out and gave the example of the State of Texas which found that potholes filled by their own Department of Transportation cost $23 each to repair, but the ones repaired by contractors cost $129 each. Sealing cracks cost $327 per square mile for state workers and more than twice that amount for contractors.

The State of Kentucky found in an audit that it could have saved $9 million had its own employees, rather than contractors been used to staff mental health facilities.

The authors point out that in Florida because of its extensive contracting out, a Council on Efficient Government now does a cost-benefit analysis and risk-assessment to look at contract and project management as well as performance measurement and continuity of operationsl plans.

Bottom line is getting "policy makers to think about things before they do them, rathn than do them intuitvely."

Guess the voters of Long Beach were pretty smart in passing Prop L which requires such an analysis before we contract out.

City Cars Cost Plenty

Today in the Committee on Civil Service and Personnel which I chair, we discussed what it costs the city to let employees have a car full time. First of all, the city buys the car or leases it; then the city insures it; licenses it; pays gas and oil for it; and pays for maintenance.

Approximately 110 employees take cars home on a full time basis. The figures given to me today indicate it costs $310,000 a year for gas, oil and maintenance. The city self insures so there are no insurance premiums to pay. I did not get the figures for the purchase or lease of these cars.

I asked for a full report for City Council because we need to go after every nickle and dime. Here's a place to start. No city cars for anyone. Either provide a monthly auto allowance to cover wear, tear, gas, oil and maintenance for a city employee to use their own car or alternatively, require the monthly submission of mileage records for reimbursement.

Looking at this issue was a suggestion of many city employees who provided ideas on how the city can save money.

Court Rules on What a City Can Spend to Promote Ballot Measures

California Supreme Court Upholds Existing Standards for Public Expenditures on Local Ballot Measures

The Supreme Court's recent decision in Vargas v. City of Salinas reaffirms the Court's holding in Stanson v. Mott (1976) 17 Cal.3d 206, and maintains existing limitations on the expenditure of public funds for materials and activities related to ballot measures. Although the Court rejected the adoption of a proposed bright-line test that would have permitted public expenditures for all communications that were not express advocacy, it provided some useful new general guidance beyond that in Stanson. It also provided helpful specific examples both of acceptable publicly funded communications--by approving the specific expenditures by the City of Salinas at issue in the lawsuit--and of unacceptable communications --by expressly disapproving communications from other cases and from a recent California election. --from Public Law news.

Funny e-cards

There is a site called someecards which has some of the funniest e-cards. (Some are too over the top.) They provide some comic relief especially about Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and cell phones.

Someone sent one to me.

In between watching the Tony Awards tonite after coming home from listening to the Long Beach Chorale sing a masterful performance, the e-card was funny especially if you put it into a political context.