COMMENTARY ON LAGUNA NIGUEL : City’s Major Goal: Assuring Citizen Role in Decision-Making : Laguna Niguel’s issues are tough, but being closer to them, we better understand our problems.

Inspired by the dream of independence from county rule and the opportunity to create a responsive local government where residents would have an equal voice with business and development interests, Laguna Niguel citizens began their quest for cityhood. The year was 1986 and the mission was local control.

Most of us are now familiar with the three-year struggle that followed and its culmination with an overwhelming 89% vote favoring incorporation as Orange County’s 29th city.

That was just a little over a year ago. Looking back and recalling the first few months when the new government seemed overwhelmed by reams of to do lists, it is reassuring to look at our city today and note the accomplishments that indeed attest to the fact that the mission is on track.

In the transition from county to local control, a major goal of the new City Council was guaranteeing that citizens would have input into the decision-making process. Thus, one of the first tasks the new council undertook was to form the Citizens Advisory Committees. As a result, citizens are directly involved in shaping city policy on a wide range of issues from planning and traffic to special events.

The next step was hiring a crack executive team to manage our new city and ensure that the environment at City Hall would be open and responsive to residents’ concerns in contrast to the days of county government insensitivity to local needs. Too often, the county couldn’t understand that the traffic lights weren’t working and that there weren’t enough athletic fields because sitting about 20 miles away in Santa Ana, they didn’t experience those problems as residents.

Progress in our first-year work program was interrupted by two very difficult land issues--the Taylor-Woodrow parkland dispute and the controversial Ridgeline Protection Initiative. The parkland dispute remains under review by the county grand jury. The investigation focuses on the propriety of the county’s rezoning of this land in 1985 for residential use and the processing of a quit-claim deed on the property by former Community Services District staff that was not authorized by the district’s directors. At the direction of the City Council, development permits on the disputed land are being withheld pending the outcome of the grand jury investigation.

Through extensive legal and economic analysis of the Ridgeline Protection Initiative, it was determined that more than 50% of the city’s development would be impacted. This included new construction, reconstruction, and remodeling of existing homes and buildings. In response to an outpouring of community concern, the city responded by taking legal steps to set the initiative aside on constitutional grounds related to individual property rights.

The city’s proposed Hillside Protection Ordinance, which was on the back burner during the ridgeline initiative controversy, is again under review at city Planning Commission hearings. The goal is to formulate a community consensus on ridgeline-development restrictions and avoid the divisiveness that disrupted the city’s problem-solving processes.

While these land-use issues continue to garner a lion’s share of media attention, the city has moved forward with programs that continue the mission of local control.

Our first budget, approved last June, is a good example of how incorporation allows local officials, familiar with local concerns, to respond to them in a more personal way. The budget actions also show how tax dollars can immediately be applied to the problems that concern the residents the most. Police protection is a prime example. Our police patrols have doubled over pre-incorporation levels. We have added a community services officer who provides safety and drug awareness programs at our local schools, and a Gang Suppression Unit to prevent this social ill from sweeping into our community.

Incorporation offers other advantages. In land use, for instance, we can determine the standard for everything from the amount of land to to be dedicated to the way that it is best used. The General Plan process will involve the community in setting the blueprint for our city’s future. It will incorporate an expanded list of growth-management policies instituted this year. These include community-design standards, stricter parking standards, and the state’s mandated Traffic Congestion Management Plan. The City Council has also adopted new Environmental Guidelines that ensure that the city, rather than developers, will control the environmental-review process for all new projects.

City Council and commission response to community input has resulted in many positive actions to address residents’ concerns. These run the gamut from acting on behalf of residents opposing the installation of a mobile phone tower at an elementary school to issuing a stop order on grading operations that threatened to destroy our community’s rare fossil heritage.

In its first year, the city also was a main participant with county and federal officials in completing negotiations for the extension of Alicia Parkway through the federal government’s Ziggurat property. This arterial will soon provide a major improvement to Laguna Niguel’s traffic-circulation system.

Another accomplishment of local control has been the ability to dramatically increase community-participation events. From an incredibly successful Earth Day program attended by more than 3,000 people to our annual Holiday Parade, residents are getting involved, and enjoying the new city.

On Tuesday, two more nearby communities in the South County will be voting on cityhood. If they do incorporate, the best neighborly advice I can give them is to make their first order of business the establishment of an effective line of communication between residents and the new city’s leaders--and to pin down agreement on their goals and timetables.

Effective communication is essential to local government and a key to its successful operation. That kind of communication is what makes local government so responsive and cityhood so desirable.

We are glad we incorporated in Laguna Niguel. We are better off as a city. The issues are just as tough and still take time to resolve. But being closer to them, we better understand our problems, and how we want to try to solve them.