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HomeMy WebLinkAbout04 - Amending Newport Municipal Code Title 17, Pertaining to Vessel Speed Limits - CorrespondenceReceived After Agenda Printed October 23, 2018 Item No. 4 From: City Clerk's Office Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 11:43 PM To: Mulvey, Jennifer; Rieff, Kim Subject: FW: Council needs to reconsider vote on Harbor Speed Limit ordinance From: Jim Mosher Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 11:42:27 PM (UTC -08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) To: Dept - City Council Cc: City Clerk's Office; Leung, Grace Subject: Council needs to reconsider vote on Harbor Speed Limit ordinance Dear members of the Newport Beach City Council, I would respectfully suggest that at your next meeting you reconsider your vote tonight on consent calendar Item 4 ("Second Reading and Adoption of Ordinance No. 2018-18 - Amending Newport Municipal Code Title 17, Pertaining to Vessel Speed Limits"). Although it may seem to have nothing to do with speed limits, if you fail to do so, you will have completely written out of the Municipal Code the public's right to appeal harbor matters to the City Council. To be clear, that right currently exists in paragraph B of Section 17.65.010 in the chapter on appeals: "B. Decisions of the Harbor Commission may be appealed to the City Council by any interested person." To the best of my knowledge, there has never been any intent to change that. Yet having spent much of the day attempting, without success, to convince the City's hearing officer of that right (in the unnoticed appeal hearings on mooring revocations he was conducting at staff's behest) I was startled to see that very paragraph had disappeared from the version of Ordinance No. 2018-18 you were being asked to adopt. To recap, Ordinance No. 2018-18 was first proposed to you in the Item 7 staff report at the October 9 Council meeting. As shown in the redline starting at the bottom of page 13, paragraph 17.65.010 "B" was to be retained, but renumbered as paragraph "C." When it was pointed out this text continued to refer to the Harbor Resources Manager, someone on staff provided an amended version of the ordinance to the Council just prior to the October 9 evening meeting. The changes shown at the bottom of page 3 of that (hurriedly prepared?) document introduced multiple new errors (as well as continuing to refer to Harbor Resources Manager). No one seems to have noticed that this amended version mangled the original paragraph B to where it appeared to duplicate paragraph A. To proceed with the first reading, the City Attorney and City Manager made verbal corrections to the flawed amended version, resulting in the posted proposed ordinance. In creating this, because it appeared to be duplicative, the City Attorney recommended deleting the new mangled paragraph B, but in doing so, he entirely eliminated as well the original paragraph B from which it had been mangled -- namely, the phrase "B. Decisions of the Harbor Commission may be appealed to the City Council by any interested person." If you allow you vote tonight to stand, that phrase -- and with it the public's right to appeal Harbor Commission decisions to the Council -- will be completely gone from the Municipal Code. Assuming that was never your intent, the vote adopting this flawed code needs to be reconsidered. Yours sincerely, Jim Mosher P.S. It is not clear to me why Ordinance No. 2018-18 was monkeying with the appeal language to start with. The only reason seems to have been to introduce language referring to the Harbormaster. But Ordinance 2018-17, which you adopted as Item 3, was supposed to be the one making those cleanups. This also raises the question of who, including the Council, reads this stuff being enacted into law in Newport Beach. Quality control seems to be lacking. The staff report is signed by three staff people (including someone in the City Attorney's Office whose scribbled initials appear to sign off on the accuracy of the statutory language). Yet none of them appear to have considered what they signed carefully enough to catch such an obvious error. A similar lack of quality control is probably how the section that was the point of contention at today's hearing officer proceedings got enacted. Based on the City Manager's comments, and the summary handouts, at the time it was introduced in 2013, the first line of Section 17.60.080 was intended to say something like "Notwithstanding Chapter 17.65, appeals of fee calculation disputes under this chapter involving any permit or lease shall be processed as follow." But the words in bold were omitted and no one at the time caught it -- allowing staff now to pervert this into something shunting permit revocation appeals off to the secret meetings with the hearing officer (something Section 17.60.080 was never intended to do). To cure this, the City really needs a "legislation committee" to publicly review proposed legislation to ensure (1) it makes sense, and (2) that the sense it conveys in plain English is the sense intended. Tonight also underscores the fallacy of no longer allowing the public to pull items from the consent calendar for full discussion by the Council. Item 4 clearly required discussion, yet after attempting to comment in three minutes total on two other consent calendar items, half my remaining minute was consumed by Council members recusing themselves --- leaving me 30 seconds both to convince the Council staff had screwed up and how to correct it. Had there been more consent calendar items, I would have had even fewer seconds for this one. That is not a good system.