The upcoming June 20 meeting of the Los Alamitos City Council is shaping up to be a very interesting affair as the Council will have just ten days to legally pass a budget and new information from opponents of the Lampson Project is also expected to surface.
City officials were a bit stunned when what is generally a routine vote to approve the upcoming budget at its May meeting was rejected. Mayor Tanya Doby and Council member Shelley Hasselbrink voted to approve the resolution authorizing it, while Council members Trisha Murphy and Emily Hibard voted no.
Mayor Pro-tem Jordon Nefulda had been present earlier in the meeting but had received permission to leave early to attend a pre-planned family event and therefore he was not present and voting when the budget discussion ended.
Generally, the City of Los Alamitos is in much better shape since the passage of a 1.5-cent sales tax measure in 2020. Under the leadership of City Manager Chet Simmons, Los Al is attempting to evolve into a two-year budgeting cycle.
According to Finance Director Craig Koehler, the city’s proposed 2023-‘24 budget is $23.2 million, and the ‘24-‘25 proposed budget is $22.1 million.
Included in next year’s budget is a series of so-called capital improvement projects, which are generally improvement projects across the city. Lagging finances in recent decades have created a backlog of needed improvements in the city, so budgets in the next couple of years include new medians, new council chamber designs, community center renovations, slurry seal projects across the city, etc.
There are $3.7 million in capital improvement projects budgeted in next year’s budget.
To accelerate the improvements, the new budget attempted to raise Simmon’s authority from $25,000 to $100,000 to approve public works contracts.
“I’m a little more conservative,” said Murphy, who proposed a lower amount. “I want the city council to have more oversight,” she said, rather than granting such an increase to the city manager.
When Murphy agreed to perhaps extend the city manager’s authority to $80,000, Hasselbrink asked Murphy to explain, asking one of the newer Council members if she even knew the average size of a city contract.
“What’s the difference,” asked Hasselbrink, “why can’t we trust the city manager we hired?”
Murphy said she would be okay with incremental steps up in approval authority for Simmons.
Development Services Director Ron Noda said because of language in the City Charter, the difference in the city manager not having such authority “could mean months, not weeks” to begin “shovel-ready projects.”
Hibard, meanwhile, spent much time asking detailed questions about the budget, for instance, why hire an Assistant for City Clerk Windy Quintanar, who holds two titles, City Clerk and Director of Communications, rather than hire a Communications Director.
Simmons said Quintanar needs to be more versatile to begin re-integrating the city with governmental structures with whom the city had somehow lost touch during their dire financial days.
Hibard said later she voted against the budget until she could meet with staff to understand what appeared to be “magic math” in the proposed budget.
Simmons said he would arrange meetings for the Council members to get their questions answered in time for the June 20 meeting. In addition, he said June 20 “was not too late” to pass the city’s budget. “I will have the document back to the Council in final form,” he told them.
Also this week, opponents of the Lampson Project, a proposed housing complex on a multi-acre site recently purchased by local developers, are expected to be at the meeting to ask why the city is approving such high density housing when emails from the city’s own consulting firm said 527 units added to the recently approved housing element was “gravy.”
According to local attorney Carol Churchill, who has made extensive requests for public records, “gravy” is what Terra Nova consultant Nicolle Criste called the 527 extra high-density housing units she added to the Los Alamitos Housing Element in response to an email dated October 21, 2022, from Paul McDougall at the California Department of Housing and Community Development.
Churchill has detailed her complaint in a letter to the editor this week and in an interview this week. She said the “gravy” is expected to come up during the oral communications portion of the meeting on June 20.