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Home My WebLink About04-10-2012 B2 SchmidtGopdwin, Heather Subject: FW: Item 2 Neighborhood Wellness COFIR SPONDENCE From: Richard Schmidt Date -1 1 1 Ite!'1'1# Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2012 10:25 AM To: Marx, Jan; Carpenter, Dan; Canter, Andrew; Smith, Kathy; Ashbaugh, John Subject: Item 2 Neighborhood Wellness Item 2: Neighborhood Wellness Dear Council Members, This measure should be dropped and thoroughly revisited or even killed. • COUNCA, o CDD DIR • CnT MGR o FIT DIR n ASST CM o FIRE CHIEF G ATTORNEY n PW DIR CLERK/oRIo o POLICE CHIEF n PARKS &RECDIR a TRIBUNE n UM DIR o NEW 7TM o HR DIR U SLo cITY NEWS o COUNCIL o CITYMGR o CLERK You've already got sufficient means to deal with neighborhood problems if you were actually committed to neighborhoods. This new set of regulations and fines is police state enhancement, and nothing more. The things that are killing neighborhoods are the city's looking the other way at things like garage conversions and illegal unpermitted apartments. These have not been enforced by the city in the past, and they will not be enforced under this new regime because the same people as in the past are still in charge. (Your building official used to be the enforcement officer.) The things that kill neighborhoods are the city's policies that promote slumification: like the permissiveness towards converting small houses into huge R -1 dormitories (the one across the street from me, with 5 bedrooms and two apartments created under the watchful eye and advice of your building department), and perverse interpretations of the city's subdivision regulations (the Scarry project on Foothill, which established a greedy developer can get higher student slum density in R -1 than in R -3 by gaming the system under the watchful eye of the Community Development Department, and now the Montgomery project further out Foothill which appears to be more of the same slum development strategy). This is the serious stuff, and the proposed new regime will do nothing about it. WHAT WILL BE ENFORCED ARE PETTY THINGS — garbage can placement, staff's arbitrary interpretation of various vague ordinances, etc. THIS WILL LEAD TO SYSTEMATIC HARASSMENT OF SELECT RESIDENTS — in all likelihood repeat harassment of the same people over and over again via staff fishing expeditions once they talk among themselves about how they've got a good one to jerk around. I have been victimized by this exact behavior several times, so I know what I'm talking about. The difference now is there will be no resolution, only police state fines out of all proportion to the alleged offense. Even the right of appeal is to be truncated by regulations and appeal fees. THIS STINKS, and its net effect will not be to make the city a better place, but a place from which more and more homeowners will want to flee. (Need I remind you since the Dunn/Hampian regime took over and declared the city's top purpose to be the "care and feeding of business" the homeowner- resident population has slid from 60% in 1990 to something in the mid -30% today (63% is the state average today)? This is not by accident — it's by deliberate city policy. (The "happiest city" screed was based on a resident - responsive and resident - centric city that existed pre -1990, not on the city today. Read it and weep if you find that assertion odd. The.hero of the story was civic activism that counteracted — with city hall's assistance — the evils of excessive business influence. Today the city is an adjunct of the chamber, the total negation of what "happiness" was based on.) I have written before and tried to get you to listen to reason — that a one - size - fits -all solution doesn't work. Some house lots are small and the opportunities, for example, to place garbage cans can't be made to work in accordance with the new rule. Even most of you, with your nice big suburban lots with many places to stick garbage cans, didn't understand how the rule would work, as demonstrated by the alleged newspaper's finding you in violation of your own rule. I don't think the council has thoroughly thought through the implications of setting loose this sort of staff police state on its residents. In any event, the PROPOSED REGULATIONS AND FINES are MEAN, ARBITRARY, AND COMPLETELY OUT OF PROPORTION TO WHAT'S AT STAKE. • The fines are ridiculously high. Even for "first violations." The very idea of a $500 per day fine for garbage can placement is worthy of a police state gestapo, not of slocity.org. • Every pretext of being resident - friendly is eliminated. Example: existing revocation of citation upon correction is eliminated, which means the CITY IS MONETARILY INCENTIVIZED TO HARASS ITS RESIDENTS. • FAIRNESS is the hallmark of any decent regulation. The idea of having to pay an appeal fee to seek fairness is reprehensible. THIS AMOUNTS TO HARSSMENT, pure and simple. Again, the city incentivizes itself monetarily to harass its residents. • The speeding up and multiplication/doubling up of fines and fees IS FURTHER INDICATION OF INTENT TO HARASS. • A DAILY FINE (FOR EACH DAY) IS COMPLETELY OVER THE TOP. Look, we're not talking about anything that actually hurts anybody. We're talking about the civic equivalent of a booger hanging out of somebody's open window. Wipe it off, if you wish, but fining someone IS COMPLETELY OVER THE TOP. The proposed regulations and fine schedule are CIVIC IMPERIALISM OF THE MOST UN- AMERICAN AND DISGUSTING SORT. Even the good cops at RQN have waved the slow down flag. Just leave things the way they are. This "enhanced enforcement" is inappropriate. As for trust in the process, there can be none given that Mr. Girvin and Mr. Johnson are in charge. As I stated above, the city has an incredibly bad record of enforcing things that matter because of its predilection (under the "care and feeding of business" model by which our Community Development Department has been intentionally corrupted) to find excuses and look the other way at everything from illegal noise and fume producing home occupations to garage conversions and multiple units in R -1. I have correspondence on such with Mr. Girvin on his watch as enforcement officer, and it's not pretty to see how he bent over to keep from rectifying serious nuisance problems that went on day after day, month after month, year after year. As for his regime as building official, I remain unimpressed. For example, when an illegal second unit nuisance was sent by a citizen for enforcement, his staff certified in writing in the city code enforcement log that the unit had been removed, tenants removed, and the violation corrected when in fact nothing of the sort had happened. Nearly two years later the unit remains, is rented illegally, and occupied. His inspectors also make up all sorts of excuses to overlook garage conversions. One might suggest they need the assistance of a good optometrist except for the fact that they apparently do see, but do not see a problem with landlords renting out garages to students willing to live in them. As for Mr. Johnson, he's new, and I am totally unimpressed with his integrity. Last fall I wrote to the City Manager about his department's regular insubordination of planning commission and council project conditions (which the CDD thinks it can ignore, negotiate away, alter, whatever, to its heart's desire), and used as an example a motion made by Mr. Ashbaugh as planning commissioner and ratified by the council on appeal with numerous conditions that clearly had been ignored. The CM referred my letter to Mr. Johnson. He replied with a see -no -evil, hear -no -evil, speak -no -evil exoneration of his minions so at variance with the facts as to indicate either gross incompetence or corrupt intent. One of the examples cited in my letter was an overheight fence completely blocking a 10- foot -wide wildlife passageway required as a condition of the project. The CDD, had he cared, could have cleared this passage by requiring conformity to the council /pc condition, or could have ordered the overheight fence dealt with. He did neither, claiming instead the facts on the site didn't exist. The passage remains blocked to this date despite his personal knowledge of the problem (and the CM's as well). This is how "care and feeding of business" has corrupted our fair city: the unnecessary and unforgiveable million dollar project staff promotes and allows to be inserted into an established neighborhood takes precedence over everything, as does the speculator's garage conversion or illegal unit, because all are about making money, not making our neighborhoods good places. The big miscreant goes scot free, while the guy with a civic booger gets persecuted. I just want you to understand what you're talking about enacting here. It will be one more nail in the coffin of any pretext this is a good or decent city. And one more reason to leave it behind. You can only expect your good residents to take so much; beyond that they'll join the flight of the other third who've fled in recent years. Sincerely, Richard Schmidt