City Officials to Be Out in Force at S.F. Meeting : Government: Dana Point and Laguna Niguel plan to send 15 or so delegates each to the League of Cities conference--too many, some officials and others are saying.

When the four-day California League of Cities annual conference convenes this weekend in San Francisco, the new cities of Dana Point and Laguna Niguel will be represented by what are expected to be the county’s largest delegations--15 or so people each.

The Dana Point group, which includes four of five City Council members, all five planning commissioners, and various department heads and staff, will travel to the conference at taxpayers’ expense to represent the city of 32,000, the county’s 24th largest out of 29 municipalities, according to the 1990 Census.

Laguna Niguel, a 44,000-resident city incorporated two years ago, will send its entire council, a planning commissioner and its police chief, among others on the city staff. For the taxpayers who will foot the bill, the costs have been estimated at $1,200 to $1,500 per person, or up to about $22,500 for each city. The costs include air fare, hotels, meals and conference-registration fees.

Laguna Niguel City Manager Tim Casey defended the cost, saying the conference “is the most important meeting of the year, as far as the city is concerned.”

“The conference offers the most concentrated groups of seminars for city officials that occurs during the course of the year,” Casey said. “During this meeting, each of us in our respective disciplines decide what type of business program we will pursue for the next year.”

By comparison, Anaheim, the county’s second largest city with a 1990 population of 266,000, will send 12 representatives, and San Juan Capistrano, the 26th largest with a population of 26,000, will send two, spokesmen for those cities said.

“Because of these tight financial times, we’re being very careful with our expenditures,” said George Scarborough, San Juan Capistrano’s assistant city manager. “This is one of the types of expenses we have made an attempt to limit. But maybe it makes sense for new cities to send more people.”

Still, there were some questions about the value of sending large delegations to the conference, even among those who are going.

“This is the first I have heard there were 15 of us,” said Laguna Niguel Councilman Paul M. Christiansen, who will attend the conference. “I do not believe we were briefed on this as a council. I knew the council, the city manager and assistant city manager, and city attorney (were going). Any more than that, I didn’t know about.

“There was a very long argument at our last council meeting regarding whether or not planning commissioners should be attending. After a lot of interaction, the consensus was that the Planning Commission would not be going on this trip, but the council would go because of the valuable input we get from all the other council members from the over 400 cities in California.”

Dana Point Councilwoman Karen Lloreda, who is the city’s mayor pro tem, said she was shocked when she learned how many staffers were making the trip.

“I’m absolutely overwhelmed that 17 of us are going,” Lloreda said. “I wasn’t going to go at first, but then when I was told since Mike (Eggers) wasn’t going, I should go. I think we need to take a look at this and decide on one seminar a year to attend.”

Two other Dana Point city officials, City Engineers Gary Dysart and Dennis Jue, will also attend the conference, but their expenses will be paid by Willdan Associates, the firm that contracts with the city for engineering services. The engineers are employees of Willdan, but since the city pays Willdan to perform its engineering services, it indirectly pays Dysart’s and Jue’s salaries.

Dana Point Mayor Mike Eggers, the sole council member who will not make the trip and the only dissenting voice in the vote to appropriate the money, stopped short of criticizing his colleagues, but he suggested that it might be better if they paid their own way.

“I’ve always said that if you want to go to a conference as a councilman, if you believe there’s a value to it, then you pay for it,” Eggers said.

But Councilwoman Eileen Krause argued that the money will be well spent.

“To me, the conference is not an expense, it’s an investment,” Krause said. “It’s an absolutely incredible tool for learning.”

About 3,500 city representatives from around the state will attend the Sunday-through-Wednesday conference, the league’s 93rd annual meeting, whose theme will be “Celebrating Our Diversity--Partnerships for Progress,” according to Janet Hester, manager of communications for the league’s Orange County office. City finances will be one of the key issues, she said.

“Our conference brochure says with the state budget problems, it is important now more than ever to get together and learn to deal with this financial crisis,” Hester said.

That crisis makes this conference “the most important meeting of the year, as far as I’m concerned,” said William O. Talley, Dana Point city manager. In the more than 100 seminars and workshops on a variety of topics and four general sessions, city representatives can talk strategy and exchange ideas, Talley said.

“If any taxpayer took a look at how much money the state and county have taken away from us this year--we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars--I think they’d understand,” Talley said. “I think we have to work on a strategy to hopefully prevent the Legislature from continuing to take money away from us to balance state and county budgets.”

Judging by phone calls to his office, however, city taxpayers are questioning the prudence of sending so many representatives to the conference, Eggers said. Among those who will make the trip are Dana Point’s police and fire chiefs--who are also county employees--and its city attorney, all of whom share their duties with other cities.

“My question is, why do we get stuck paying the whole share for these people?” Eggers said.

Talley said that since those employees “run our city departments, we decided to pay for them. If the county paid, they would hit us with an overhead charge anyway.”

Because the conference draws so many representatives from around the state, the league gets reduced rates for air travel and hotel rooms, Hester said. Loron Cox, Dana Point’s finance director, listed the proposed conference costs at $150 each for registration, between $58 and $88 for air fare, $130 to $140 per night for hotel rooms, and meals, and an estimated $50 per day “at least” for meals.

Lloreda says those costs spread among 15 people are hard for her to take.

“It’s not that these conferences are not beneficial, because they are,” she said. “But I just can’t justify the costs.”