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Home My WebLink About00 - Written CommentsReceived After Agenda Printed April 10, 108 Written Comments April 10, 2018, Council Consent Calendar Comments The following comments on items on the Newport Beach City Council agenda are submitted by: Jim Mosher ( jimmosher(c)yahoo.com ), 2210 Private Road, Newport Beach 92660 (949-548-6229) Item 1. Minutes for the March 27, 2018 City Council Meeting The passages shown in italics below are from the draft minutes with suggested corrections indicated in s*''��, wkeo='t underline format. The page numbers refer to Volume 63. Page 469, Item X, paragraph 2, sentence 2: "He reported on their victim -centered approach model which they shared with jurisdictions across the United States." [?] Page 469, last paragraph: "Unknown _A speaker defined human trafficking and believed traffickers also attempt to pick up people from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings." [or "A unidentified speaker ..." — and likewise on page 473, paragraph 8, and page 477, paragraphs 5 and 7 from end] Page 473, paragraph 4: "Following comments by Mayor Pro Tem O'Neill, City Attorney Harp suggested Council indicate that today's vote supersedes the vote taken at the previous meeting, the letter to Assembly Member Harper be signed by Mayor Pro Tem O'Neill since Mayor Duffield has a conflict of interest, and the Assembly Bill number be corrected to AB -1196." Page 473, paragraph 3 from end: "Tom ShopmiNer Schottmiller believed the plan would not provide a return on investment and urged Council not to proceed." Page 476, Item 11, paragraph 2, last sentence: "He stated the new RHNA should be adopted in the fall of 2020." Item 5. Authorize Submittal of Orange County Transportation Authority Grant Application for Expansion of the Balboa Peninsula Trolley Program and Approve Amendment No. 3 with Professional Parking Without seeing the grant proposal the Council is being asked to endorse, or the contract that it is being asked to amend, the staff report is essentially impossible to understand or verify, and the description of the various permutations described on page 5-2 is very difficult, for me at least, to follow. It might have been helpful to indicate where readers could find the existing Cooperative Agreement with OCTA, C-8306-1 (approved as Item 9 at the Council's Dec. 13, 2016, meeting), and the existing contract with Professional Parking, C-8306-2 (already once amended). The report on page 5-2 is particularly inscrutable. The matching amounts required of the City as stated under Funding Requirements seem considerably more than 10% of the totals stated, and I am unable to correlate those totals with the numbers shown on page 5-13. For example, from page 5-13, the increase in total cost in going from a 10 weekend program to a 15 weekend one appears to be $998,475 - 837,331 = $161,144, yet page 5-2 refers to a $348,000 increase. Does the latter April 10, 2018, Council Consent Calendar Comments - Jim Mosher Page 2 of 3 include costs other than those going to Professional Parking as detailed on page 5-13? If so, what are they? And, mysteriously, while the increase being communicated to OCTA is larger than can be explained by page 5-13, the current 10 weekend program cost of $778,925 stated on page 5-2 is less than the seven year total expected to be paid to Professional Parking, for such a program, of $126,446.40 + 837,331 = $963,777.40 per pages 5-12 and 5-13. Is the current OCTA grant not funding even a 10 weekend program with non -weekend holidays? Whatever the correct numbers are, I take it the City has a seven-year agreement with OCTA for reimbursement of a 10 weekend program. Setting aside the question of whether the three non - weekend holidays are included in the existing OCTA agreement, or not, in the first year, the City, apparently at its own cost, added 2 weekends. The City is now asking OCTA to help with a 15 weekend program (plus non -weekend holidays), but is telling OCTA it will roll back to a 10 weekend program if OCTA does not agree. In that regard, it is unclear to me what direction the Council is being asked to give staff. If the grant expansion does not materialize, is the Council really asking staff to roll the program back to 10 weekends (and possibly remove non -weekend holidays) or will the City expand to 12 or 15 weekends at its own expense? Whether the staff proposal is understandable in the above respects, or not, of what is presented, Exhibit D-1 of the amended contract (page 5-12), like its predecessors, contains something especially mysterious to me, namely the statement that: "The City shall deduct from the invoice and other observation any penalties based upon City's determination of performance in relation to the penalties section of the Agreement." I am not ashamed to say I have no idea what "deducting from an invoice and other observation" means, and might not understand it even if I knew where the "penalties section of the Agreement" was. Item 6. Disposition of Excess Special Improvement District Fund Balances This seems to me like a matter for which the Council, before acting, should seek a recommendation from the Finance Committee. It seems strange The Irvine Company is not mentioned in the staff report since "1993 CIOSK from which the problem stems seems to refer to Development Agreement No. 6, C-2920, with The Irvine Company, adopted September 14, 1992, by Ordinance 92-35, in which the agreed to advance seems to have been $20,600,000 - 4,806,000 = $15,794,000 (not $14 or 14.4 million). At a minimum, I would have thought the staff report would have included a map showing where the properties affected, and potentially benefitted by staff's recommended action are. Beyond that, I believe there are many questions that deserve public discussion before the Council decides to rubberstamp staff's solution — and the Finance Committee would seem the proper initial venue for them. April 10, 2018, Council Consent Calendar Comments - Jim Mosher Page 3 of 3 Those questions include: Why the bond issues to cover a $14(?) or 14.4(?) million "cash" advance were $16.8 million and then $15.5 million, what the source of the $2.3 million remaining is, how the 16 parcels owned by The Irvine Company in 1993 (or 1992?) evolved into 273 parcels with a variety of owners, who paid what when, whether the City has an obligation to repay any of the surplus, and if so, to whom? This may seem a simple refund of excess payments into a special assessment district, but the opening paragraph of the Discussion on page 6-2 suggests that under the original agreement the City's repayment obligation should have ended in February 2016, whether there was an ending balance, or not. $2.3 million seems like a large amount of money that should not be disbursed until its ownership is more clearly understood than I can glean from the staff report. Item 10. Approval and Award of Agreement to Hardy & Harper, Inc. for Sidewalk Grinding Services This contract and staff report raises a number of questions, including why there is such a wide variation in proposed costs, ranging from one-third lower to twenty-five times higher than staff's choice. Under the previous $200,000 five-year contract, C-4011, approved as Item 9 at the Council's April 9, 2013, meeting, but not mentioned in present report, the price for grinding is $16.75 per location, allowing the City to repair about 2,500 panels per year at a cost of about $40,000 — work which, the report estimates, would have cost around $435 per panel if the concrete were to be cut and replaced. While the dollar amount of the proposed contract has doubled to $400,000, the cost has more than doubled, to $40 per location (with a new 30 jobs minimum). That means the City will be getting less work at a higher cost, and will only be able to repair 2,000 panels per year. Among the questions: 1. Could the existing contract have been extended? 2. Why did the incumbent not bid? 3. Is the more than doubling of cost per job a result of new prevailing wage requirements? 4. If so, would it now be cheaper to do this work in-house? 5. What was technically deficient about Precision Concrete Cuttings' proposal to perform the work by cutting and replacing sections? The staff report tells us grinding is normally the cheapest alternative, so that is what was asked for, but here we seem to have an offer of a still cheaper solution. 6. What did Corner Keystone propose to do a cost of, apparently, around $1,000 per repair? Was there some ambiguity in the RFP that would have led to such a disparity in cost estimates?