Laguna Beach ends pursuit of charter city ballot measure
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A draft for a charter city measure appeared before the Laguna Beach City Council on Tuesday night, but council members determined the discussion would go no further following an initial public hearing.
Had the council decided to continue down the path of placing the question before voters on the November ballot, a second public hearing would have been required at least 30 days later.
City officials had entertained the possibility switching from a common law city governed by state statues to a charter city primarily to pursue benefits around administrative fines and procurement of contracting for city services and public works.
City Manager Dave Kiff had been one of the strongest proponents charter status, advocating that it could positively affect parking enforcement by allowing the city to contract out the service.
“I don’t think this was ever intended to be a power grab,” Councilman Alex Rounaghi said. “... I don’t know that the juice is worth the squeeze here in terms of what the benefits would be. … I have no interest in ever creating a system that would give us more power, or give future councils more power. I have no interest in that, and I don’t want there to be a perception of that, or potentially a reality of that.”
The Laguna Beach City Council directed staff to draft a simple charter that would address a few areas of concern, including the administration of fines, parking enforcement and public contracting.
Kiff, who formerly served as city manager of Newport Beach, shared his experience when it came to the ability to contract out parking enforcement in the neighboring coastal city.
“It was a significant game change in the efficiency and effectiveness of how we collected the fines and issued the tickets with the private company,” Kiff said. “To me, this is important enough to become a charter city, because we are so complex in terms of our parking, whether it’s the app, or the monitoring of where you can park at any one time, or enforcement, or collection, that having one entity do that instead of the way we do it, which is a bit haphazard, … tying all those things together makes for a much more efficient process.”
Parking enforcement is currently carried out by the Laguna Beach police department, but one concern brought up during the public hearing was that a third party would be incentivized to write more tickets. That would likely impact both residents and visitors.
“We haven’t really articulated … the procurement benefits,” Councilman Bob Whalen said. “If those were really tangible and you could translate them into cost savings, that’s one thing to look at. … The parking enforcement revenues have gone up and down over the years, depending on, really, how active we are.”
As to the matter of administrative citations, Assistant City Atty. Pat Donegan said they are seen less as a “revenue generator” and more as a “compliance generator.” A charter city would have the ability to set its own maximum fine for code violations as a municipal affair.
“We don’t want to be draconian,” Donegan said. “We’re not in the business of trying to take residents’ or guests’ money. We want them to say, ‘The penalty is so stiff, I’m not going to drink at Laguna Beach,’ or, ‘I’m not going to do X, Y and Z in the park.’”
City Atty. Megan Garibaldi added that in discussions with other jurisdictions about their enforcement efforts, it had been noted that “it may be more effective on the criminal front to start booking people on the beach.”
With the balance of the council indicating it did not support going forward with the charter city process, particularly under time constraints to meet current election cycle deadlines, Mayor Mark Orgill said recent meetings had provided a platform for discussion of the idea.
“I wanted to learn about if there was any opportunities with enforcement, just parking and what we could do to better control some of the impacts of tourism,” Orgill said. “I thought it was worth exploring.”
