Special City Council Meeting Monday Jan 7, 2013
January 4, 2013 in 2013 Issues, City Council, City Council Meetings By: jmivler
(Los Alamitos, 1/4/2012, by JM Ivler) At 6:00 PM this Monday, Jan 7, 2013, there will be a special meeting at City Hall of Los Alamitos’ new City Council., with four very interesting agenda items plus an intriguing closed session.
After we get past the Call To Order and the Roll Call we seem to have eliminated the Pledge and the required sermon, prayer, um, whatever it is that they call it to keep it barely Constitutional. We also seem to have eliminated Public Comments and any Consent Calendar items and we move on to the Special Orders Of The Day.
Mayor pro tem revisited?
Do you all remember the 5-0 votes for Mayor and Mayor Pro Tem? Well it seems that Mayor Pro Tem Murphy has requested that the process be revisited. So, my best guess is the surprise that was delivered to all by his selection will be part of that discussion.
The recommendation from City Staff is to “Receive and file” or ”Action as Council deems appropriate.” I’m betting on the “or” and suspect that Councilman Murphy is going to deem it appropriate to discuss this item and maybe even take some action.
My hope is that part of that action will be to create a set of processes or procedures to avoid the situation where we have a member of City Council going into their sixth year and NOT having served as Mayor while all the other members with more than a months experience have served as Mayor (one twice!).
Management salaries & benefits revisited
This will be followed by a revisit to the Contract Terms that was voted on and then tabled in the last meeting. But this time in stead of just pushing the contract through, there will actually be a discussion on the item.
What an amazing idea. To have an open and frank discussion on things like why the city is paying top dollar for employees and also paying a pension.
The reason that pensions were created for public service were to offset the fact that government employees were being paid below the same wages that they could get in the private sector. Since we are no longer paying less for public employees than they can get in the private sector, it’s really a good time to discuss why we are paying for pensions as well.
My favorite line of all this is where the agemda says that salary surveys show that management position salaries in Los Alamitos have dropped below the lowest level for comparable positions in the County.
A check of a comparable position for a non-profit CEO in the Long Beach area with 10 direct reports, a BA, 5-10 years experience and managing a budget of $4,000,000 is less than $100,000/yr. Last time I checked we are paying over $170,000/yr for the City Manager. I guess when you measure the position against other overpaid City Manager positions, most in cities over five times our size, yes, we are low. But when you compare to the private marketplace we are way high. It should be an interesting discussion to see why we need to pay so much, and pay more on top of it.
City Clerk, City Attorney Appointments
Then we move on to the approval of the terms of employment for Windy as City Clerk.
We close off the discussion items with the issues surrounding replacing the City Attorney.
Closed Session
Then we have a closed item dealing with employment of the City Manager, and it says nothing about evaluations or negotiations! While I have my suspicions over what this is all about, it’s a closed session so I’m going to keep my suspicions to myself, but everyone can feel free to voice theirs in the comments section.
Click here for the complete agenda, followed by staff reports and attachments.
As always, let’s keep Dave E. happy by keeping all the comment family friendly.
Real quick side note. This is not a “news” site, it’s a site with editorial. While Dave E. is really good at not putting his opinions in these type of posts, I’m not. All the facts are here, but so is my editorial content. It’s easier to just include the editorial in the original post than write the post and then a comment on it. Sorry in advance if anyone is bothered by the style differences.
Thanks JM for posting a heads up about the city council meeting on Monday, I hope this is being video taped for play on LATV. Since their will be discussion about Salary for city hall staff it should be of interest to the entire tax paying community.
Does the public even know their is a meeting on an off Monday?
This is not a regularly scheduled meeting, so I don’t know how many of the residents will be aware it is happening. It recorded they can at least watch it later on Latv OR youtube if they want to see where their money is going. I do recall at a past city council meeting that it was voted on that anything having to do with fiances would be televised live and replayed on LATV.
Kind of wondering why the staff didn’t put this on the regular meeting Jan 22, when most people would plan on attending or watching.
First they hide this in the consent calendar, now it on a “special meeting” OK as long as televised.
I have no idea about it being televised. I do know that there are reasons why we used to have two meetings a month.
There are any number of reasons that this is under consideration right now.
Addressing the contract is an important issue. There are a number of things involved in doing this and they start with the need to discuss what kind of City we are and what kind of city we want to be. There are questions to be asked about what our real budget is, how much is on the books and how much is off, and whether we can actually afford to implement the contract as designed.
The OC Register reported that our City Manager makes $170,000 + benefits a year. I don’t know about anyone else, but this is a big issue for me. a 9% raise is $15,300. Now, we can say “but look, we haven’t had a raise in that position in years!”, but that’s not 100% accurate. The current City Manager was the Director of Rec before taking the position, and believe me, Angie wasn’t making $170,000 in that position. So, if Angie is going to stay on as City Manager for a second year we are talking about giving her a raise that is, well massive. Is the City Manager worth another $1,275/month? I have a better question. Is the City Manager worth $14,167/month, which is what we are paying today?
The median income for a family in Los Alamitos is $55,286 (2010). We are paying the City Manager more than three times the median salary of the residents? And now we are talking about a raise? In these economic times when income is down, unemployment is up, and tax revenues are dropping, we are talking about increasing the pay for this position by almost 1/3 of the median family income in the City?
I’m sorry, but on what planet does this make sense?
Additionally, we have to think about the historic reasons that we paid pensions to public service employees. I don’t want to appear that I’m bagging on Angie, I adore Angie and this is in no way personal. But the reason that we gave public service employees pensions was because they were underpaid and we were offsetting the lack of the higher private sector pay with a promise of retirement pay. It’s time to realize that at $170,000 we are NOT underpaying the City Manager. In fact, if we look at pay for a private sector CEO with 5-10 years of experience, 10 direct reports, a BA and a $4,000,000 budget the average (in the Long Beach area) is about $100,000 with a benefits package. So, if we are going to discuss pensions, then let’s discuss pay. If the City Manager is getting under the private sector pay scale I have no problem with a pension. But when the pay is almost twice as much as the private sector pays, then it’s time to demand that they pay for their own retirement.
I guess that rather than talk about this contract, what I want is to discuss what we want from City staff and at City Hall. This is most likely a public employees worst nightmare, but it’s time for the City of Los Alamitos to decide what we are and what we want to be. Exactly what services does the City provide and what type of staffing do we need to provide these services? What is equitable pay for someone to do the job? What type of benefits package should we have?
This is NOT a competitive environment where we are competing with Cypress to hire a “better City Manager” or a “better City Clerk” than they have. Our needs as a city are different than Cypress at almost five times our size. Cypress is 6.6 square miles and has 48,500+ residents. Los Alamitos is 4.1 square miles (including the JFTB) and has 11,620 residents. And don’t even think Seal Beach (13.23 square miles). We have very different cities and very different needs. If the base is BRAC’d and we actually develop that area, then maybe we can discuss being competitive with our neighbors. Let’s look at who we are most like. Rossmoor. They have 10,298 residents and are 1.5 square miles (when you take out the JFTB we are a bit over 2 square miles). So, let’s start to get real about who we are, what we are, what we can afford and what we want to be.
This contract is just the opening act. It is time for us to wake up and take control of our destiny and stop trying to pretend that we are something we are not. We can’t afford to play like we are a “big city” when we have more in common with Rossmoor than the cities that surround us. We should be remodeling our city to meet our actual needs,and where possible we should partner to offset costs for us and our neighbors (think the Rec Department).
Monday is the beginning of a discussion, not the end of it.
Oh yes. Far too often we have heard that what we need is stability. In fact that is Troy Edgar’s big mantra. He used that to beat up on Fred Freeman, Cat Driscoll and Ken Parker. Well, let’s look at how much stability we have had. Five (or is it six) different City Managers under Mr. Edgar. The longest was Jeff Stewart. So much for stability. It’s a red herring. What we need is a return on investment. We need to rightsize the city. We need to determine what jobs we need, what skills they require and pay people appropriately for their talent. This contract opens up the opportunity to have this discussion, and I hope that it will start on Monday night. I am still amazed that Edgar, Poe and Stephens tried to pass this through without even having a discussion on it. Not surprised, but amazed at the audacity of attempting it. The new council did the right thing by bringing it back for discussion, now let;s hope they do the right thing and determine that we need to rightsize the City to meet the needs of the City.
You are 100% correct.
Thanks, JM for burning the midnight oil early this morning to get word our on an important Special Council Meeting that even caught me by surprise. . . and I checked the official posting board outside City Hall late yesterday morning!
This may not be a “news” site specifically, but our readers get an awful lot of Los Alamitos News before it posts anywhere else!
To answer “Transparency’s” question, I’m pretty sure Special Council meetings are televised, and I’ve got an e-mail out to find out about this one specifically & will post a comment once I know for sure.
Whether it’s televised or not I’d suggest our readers use the “share” button above to spread the word of this important meeting. Sounds very interesting.
At least that’s the word I’m getting from the people who should know! Hopefully that will change on Monday.
I’m being told that the policy is that only Regular and Budget Council Meetings are televised.
If that is the case, it is inconsistent with every Council Member’s repeated commitment to transparency.
It may make sense for 5 p.m. Special Meetings that move almost immediately into closed session, and in a few other cases.
But it makes no sense for what would have been a Regular Meeting Date except for the current one Regular Meeting a month scheduling mode. After all, Special Meetings when needed were offered as part of the package. No mention of a “by the way, those Special Meetings in lieu of bimonthly regular meetings won’t be televised.”
Having video available online and on LosAlTV3 is even more important when those Special Meetings in lieu of bimonthly Regular Meetings are held at 6:00 p.m., when most of our residents are either eating dinner or still commuting home!
I hope our City Staff can find a way to have this Monday’s meeting carried and rebroadcast on LosAlTV, and put up online.
If the new and old honest and transparent council members want the meeting on TV it will be on TV. If it’s not on TV then the whole meeting should be tabled till the next regular scheduled city council meeting. What the hell is going on at city hall? This is not Cuba.
This just in from our City Manager:
“We are broadcasting Monday’s special meeting live and following our usual rebroadcasting and web procedures. FYI.”
Kudos to our Council, Mayor, City Manager & City Staff for taking another step towards greater transparency, accountability, community involvement. . . and common sense!! Thanks, & God bless you!