I agree with John Thomasʻs astute analysis and recommendations in the Indy back on Aug. 9, but I don’t think he addressed municipal waste and incompetence. Why donʻt we have enough parking enforcement, beach patrol, and trash pickup?
A few important facts missed in the Aug. 13 LA Times coverage of the “summer of our discontent” here in Laguna Beach:
In our small city of 23,000 residents, 56% of city revenue comes from property taxes — 90% of that comes from our residential (not commercial) property taxes.
There is or has been money in the annual budget for more beach patrol, trash pickup, emergency services and parking enforcement. It just wasnʻt put there.
In the past two years, almost $1 million of our taxpayer dollars have gone to what can only be described as municipal dysfunction and failure of oversight: $500,000 to hasten the exit of an incompetent city manager and to mask any questions about her handling of multiple administrative blunders, $387,000 to settle an oversight by the then-city attorney and city employees to insert an indemnification clause in a contract.
This last led to the abrupt resignation of one of said city employees without explanation, quickly followed by the retirement and replacement of the longtime city attorney who had been called to account along with the city council for violations of the Brown Act by the Orange County District Attorney.
This week, we learned that the cityʻs finance officer unilaterally terminated the cityʻs contract with its outside audit firm without first consulting city council, possibly to cover up failures by his own department. Vast sums have been wasted on unnecessary administrative costs, expensive consultants and badly constructed surveys.
A subset of the City Council has devoted itself to maintaining the status quo, particularly to protect Laguna’s realtors, developers and chamber of commerce interests, not the interests of the residents.
In all of the above lapses, it has been Councilman, oft-times Mayor, Bob Whalen who has been quoted with an explanation of how this wasnʻt really what it seemed, why it was actually the best solution and why there wasnʻt really anything to see here.
Now Whalen is running again! He has been on the council since 2012 and managed to be mayor and, thereby, sole mouthpiece for the city five times by working a 3-vote majority on the council rather than observing the previously longstanding practice of rotating that position through every individual council member.
Let me reiterate: There is or has been money in the annual budget to make the tourist experience manageable. It has not been managed, budgeted or envisioned.
Residents of Laguna Beach deserve to feel discontented. It is time for a change in civic leadership.
Kiku Terasaki, Laguna Beach
I have gone to laguna beach as a visitor and have seen a couple of residents walk from their homes with trash bags from their home and throw it into the trash cans on the street instead of the trash cans in their homes I seen a city worker changing the trash bags and ask them if they residents always throw their home trash in public bins he told me everyday and even a couple of times a day and then they get complaints from people saying the trash is overflowing why don’t laguna beach residents throw their trash in their homes they should be fined
THIS JUST IN and it is truly symptomatic of the level of dysfunction I refer to above.
It took a good dose of bad publicity and resident reaction to get them off and running! So urgent that they sent it via Nixl text. LOL
https://www.lagunabeachcity.net/Home/Components/News/News/1159/13
Ms Terasaki is spot on in her analysis. It is laughable that the Council majority pretends to be alarmed at the current level of visitor impact we’ve been experiencing these past few summers; when the focus of most of their actions have been to bring “vitality” to our town. Mayor Kempf has been the cheerleader for this since the day she joined the council back in Dec 2018. And 5 time Mayor Bob has been right alongside her the entire time. How many times have we heard them bemoan the lack of “vitality” in the downtown? They sometimes give lip service to caring about residents’ quality of life, but their entire tenures on Council have shown that their utmost priority has been and continues to be the well-being of their majority donor-class: Chamber of commerce, developers and real-estate interests. The Laguna Beach Stewardship and Visitor Impact Ad Hoc Committee is an attempt to plug the dyke which they caused to break.