At last Monday’s City Council meeting, a resident from the Rancho Higuera area complained to the City Council about a city- sponsored meeting being held on a topic of interest to Rancho Higuera without notification to the residents of the area.
The event was an ACOR (Advisory Committee on Development) meeting related to the Rethink Project that is being developed in Rancho Higuera. I have been attending a number of City Council meetings in the past year, and I can remember many times when the residents of Rancho Higuera addressed the Council.
Surely Somebody Made a Request
This was usually done as an item that was Not-on-the- Agenda. As a result of these appearances, the city should know the names of these residents. But in response to the concern expressed by the resident, staff said that the city had met the legal requirement for meeting notification. And this legal requirement is that the city must post the agenda at City Hall.
This means that residents must constantly go to City Hall to see if there is possibly an item on an agenda that may affect them. On the speaker cards turned in at City Council meetings there is the following sentence:
If you would like to receive future notification on the topic you are addressing, please check box and complete the following.
Does the city really mean this?
I cannot believe that all those speakers from Rancho Higuera could have filled out these speaker cards without some of them checking the box and giving their addresses.
Legal Limit Isn’t Always What Is Best
The city had the opportunity to show that it means what it says but chose to notify the residents of Rancho Higuera only by posting the agenda at City Hall.
They did what is legally required, not what should have been done. This is unacceptable.
The topic of Meeting Notification will be on an upcoming Council agenda. I hope the Council establishes notification requirements that insure proper notification to all interested citizens.
Lastly, the meeting reminded me of a movie, which is probably appropriate for the Heart of Screenland.
You probably think I am referring to the movie “The Longest Day,” but I am not. That belongs to Entrada.
I was thinking of the movie “The Lion King.”
Not because the animals (the public) gathered in the pride lands (Council Chambers) to hear Mufasa (the City Council).
I Am Getting Dizzy. Are You?
And while there was the evil Scar, in the person of a developer, there didn’t appear to be a Rafiki, the wise old mandrill.
What made me think about “The “The Circle of Life.”
In this case I was thinking of “The Circle of Development.”
There was a lot of talk at the meeting about the reason the project needed to be a large size was because of the cost of the property. And why is the property so expensive? It is expensive because of the size of the project that can be built on it.
Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
We build big because the property is expensive.
The property is expensive because we can build big.
And this is “The Circle of Development.”
How do we break the circle?
We could rely on developers to build smaller or have owners sell for less.
But I wouldn’t count on it. There has been a significant comment from Councilmen, Commissioners, developers and staff during discussions on all controversial projects except Entrada.
This comment is:
It may be large but it is not as large as the codes would permit to be built.
It appears that if citizens want smaller projects, they must change the rules on what determines the size of what can be built.
If we want to live under “The Lion King” worry-free philosophy of Hakuna Matata, this is what we will need to do.
Tom Supple may be contacted at
tomjsup@ca.rr.com
