HomeMy WebLinkAbout03a_Public Comments_Additional Materials_MosherGeneral Plan Update Steering Committee - March 6, 2019
Item No. 3a. al. and b3 Additional Materials Received
March 6, 2019, GPU Steering Committee Comments
These comments on Newport Beach General Plan Update Steering Committee agenda items are
submitted by: Jim Mosher ( limmosher(o-)yahoo.com ), 2210 Private Road, Newport Beach 92660
Item Ill. Public Comments (non -agenda items)
1. I remain curious about the status of staff's efforts to produce a readily -accessible copy of the
current General Plan. I see nothing new posted on the City website. Instead, the link to the
GP on the City's GPU web page continues to go to a page with links to 73 separate PDF
files constituting what it says is the 600 or so pages of the General Plan. It might be noted
that every two weeks the City Clerk is able to consolidate numerous disparate documents
and post them as a single electronically -indexed PDF Council agenda packet, often
containing more than 1,000 pages. It does not seem like it should be difficult to do the same
with the current GP.
2. To the extent they are interested in the current General Plan and the degree to which it
needs revision, I hope the Committee members will track the City's Annual General Plan
Status Report as it wends its way through the Planning Commission on March 7 and the
City Council on March 26. The report details the City's progress in fulfilling the promises
committed to in the GP's 2006 Implementation Program and the goals set forth in the
current Housing Element. The Implementation Program (Chapter 13 of the GP) was itself
supposed to be reviewed and updated annually. Needless to say, it has not.
Item IV.a: Review Action Minutes of the February 20, 2019 Meeting
I would like to suggest the following grammatical correction:
Page 2, paragraph 2: "The Committee unanimously decided to provide el rovide direction
to staff to redraft the RFP to reflect the Listen and Learn component only for the next
meeting."
I would also like to observe that action minutes of the sort being presented here provide a very
bare -bones record of what happened at the meeting, particularly as to such matters as who said
what. This is likely inconsistent with most people's notion of the "fully transparent" General Plan
update process we have been promised.
By way of comparison, during the 2000-2006 General Plan Update process, the Council's
eleven -member General Plan Update Committee (the equivalent of the present Steering
Committee) produced fairly extensive written minutes which, although not readily available on
the City website, seem to have been preserved in the City's archives. In 2013-2014, the Land
Use Element Amendment Advisory Committee (which seems to have served as both a steering
and drafting body) kept more cryptic minutes, similar to these, but on the motion of Committee
member Paul Watkins, they were consistently approved contingent upon the City retaining a
complete audio recording as a supplement to them (see, for example, Item II from August 6,
2013). Unfortunately, those recordings do not seem to have been retained in a publicly