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Home My WebLink About01-03-2017 PC, Mourenza.pdf (2)RCE_ `01i NC IL. ]MEETING: JAN 0 4 2017 fTEM NO.:._ Lt, 6W _ .__ C r i - From: Lydia Mourenza [ Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2017 2:30 PM To: E-mail Council Website <emailcouncil@slocity.org> Subject: Public comment city council 1/3/2017 please post on agenda. I noticed a typo please put this in if not done already. I will bring a copy tonight Open government, transparency, need for ease of access to promote and encourage public participation. Please agendize for public input and Council consideration I previously addressed this issue and am happy to see that all advisory body meetings are now being recorded. We need to go a step further and video record all meetings and make then available on demand as well as Chanel 20. Advisory Body members have yet to be provided with slocity.org email addresses which is essential to afford equal access by residents, eliminating the City staff gatekeepers or advantage to those who are able to obtain the members private emails. The City Council and advisory bodies set a yearly schedule yet nothing is on the City web site calendar until 1 week prior to a meeting. The meetings should be calendared subject to cancellation. Documents provided to the Public as they are prepared rather than the typical 300 - 700 page dump, or 3000 pages currently before the Planning Commission. The agenda packets are so large they should be separated by item when over 50 pages. Public meetings should start no earlier than 5:30. If the quantity of items render earlier start times for completion the frequency of meetings needs to be increased. It appears that the City Council in particular needs to meet weekly. The use of the Tribune for public notice should be reviewed. Home delivery is approaching $400. The New Times is free and readily available. The City web site needs to be uniform with the various advisory bodies particularly the lack of an Agenda Correspondence button ( ARC 10/17/16, Bicycle Advisory, Construction Board, Investment Oversight, Jack House, Mass Trans, Parks & Rec, Promotion CC, Revenue EOC, TBTD). Minutes need to given greater priority: Admin Review 6/7/16, Bicycle 7/21/16, Construction 7/29/14 approved 3/26/15, CHC 10/24/16, Human Relations 4/1/15, Investment 8/18/16, Jack House 10/14/16, Mass Trans no minutes, Personnel Board 6/2/16, Planning Commission 8/24/16, Pro Coord Committee 9/9/15, REOC 3/10/16, Tree 10/24/16, TBTD 9/14/16. Items are appealed without full minutes having been prepared. The Action Minutes are being modified without any acknowledgement. While the City Council minutes of 11/15 and 12/13 are now more complete, the failure to identify the documents as amended appears underhanded and does not promote confidence in the claimed transparency of our City. Please agendize Open Government so that residents may advise you of their concerns and you will have an opportunity to discuss. Lydia Mourenza Anholm, SLO Sent from my iPad Public Comment Re: Lack of city flood preparation Dear Council Members, KSBY is predicting a huge storm this weekend, stating it will have flood potential for our city. Whether that happens or not, this should be a wake up call for our new Council and Mayor since the city is woefully unprepared for any flood event, let alone a major one. If such occurs, you can be certain you will be the target of much recrimination (in this case well-deserved) for the decades of failure to perform adequate maintenance on our floodways. Our last flood was in 1973. It was probably a "25 -year flood," or thereabouts. We are long over due for a repeat. That flood was devastating. You, and current city staff, have no clue how devastating such an event can be. do because I was there — for it, and for the aftermath. I was the Telegram -Tribune city hall reporter who covered much of the flood. I was also a brand new homeowner, on a creek, in a flood zone. As a result of what one council member considered clear-headed reporting on the emotion -laden disaster, I was appointed to the city's newly formed Waterways Planning Board, and served on it through its 7 -year life, the beginning of 19 years of contributions to city advisory bodies. The first charge of the WWPB was to determine what had happened, and why. We began by walking the entire creek system. Our findings were stark: most of the damage could have been prevented. We found most damage had been caused by obstructions within the creek. There were man-made obstructions, like some culverts that were too small to carry the flow, bridges with supports in creeks that caught debris and plugged the flow, and incursions into the channels by homeowners and developers. There were also natural obstructions — vegetation in places where it blocked flow. We found no instances in which a natural creek channel overflowed absent some human cause or maintainable vegetative obstruction! In other words, our findings were a resounding negative for engineered solutions like channels or creek widenings. Most of the man-made obstructions were quickly dealt with. For the natural obstructions, we recommended, and the Council adopted, an annual pruning program for the entire creek system to be carried out in late summer to make sure flow areas in storm season would be adequate. This amounted to a $40K per year cost to the city, to prevent millions of dollars in property damage and potential loss of life. That program was carried out annually, with some sensitivity as well as focused skill, until the early 1990s, when the City Administrator decided he'd rather spend the funds on other things. So today, we have more than a 2 decade backlog of creek maintenance. What could have been dealt with via pruning shears and a hand saw on an annual basis is now a forest of full grown obstructions within flow areas around bridges and culverts, which have acquired human constituencies that must be dealt with. I find there's little will at City Hall to deal with anything concerning routine creek maintenance. Noting that "all politics is local," I'll share my own frustration with getting any city action on a clear flow obstruction. Starting in the mid-1990s, my neighbors began to ask the city to tend to the clogged overgrown Broad -Murray culvert on Old Garden Creek, a culvert too small to carry flood flow even when operating at full capacity. Here's what the outlet end of that culvert looked like, the round pipe partially full of rock debris and outlets blocked by debris piles. In other words, flow diminished in a way that any viewer could understand obstructed full flow. We begged and pleaded for years, and no action. Finally Neil Havlik got involved, and figured out how to flush the most -clogged of the pipes using storm flow itself — practically for free. It worked! But it was a treatment that would need to be re -performed every couple of years. When it came time to do it again, the city refused. And there we were. Flummoxed by a city in denial. Year by year the blockage got worse and worse. We begged for years, and were ignored. Finally, when the present City Manager came on, I thought it worth a try to see if she'd be any different. She agreed to visit the site. She did, and wrote back that she was convinced the culvert — even more plugged by this time than in the photo above (about half full of rock) — was in the best possible shape to face the on -coming winter! Some years later, after many more letters to the Council, we did finally get some recognition of the problem, which would be scheduled for correction several years hence! In the meanwhile we were apparently supposed to pray for drought. The "correction" to what could have been handled with annual vegetative maintenance at the culvert's ends and Neil Havlik's free method for flushing debris from the pipe, was instead developed into a costly contractor -performed "capital improvement project" (This is not what CIPs are supposed to be about.) so disruptive that it required numerous higher agency permits. This is characteristic of how "flood control" is currently dealt with at the city: small correctible problems are not corrected in timely fashion, but are allowed to grow into major messes that threaten lives and property, while attention instead is focused on major engineering projects. And so, instead of annually adequate flood channel maintenance like we used to do, we think instead of atrocities like the Mid-Higuera Bypass, a huge multi-million dollar creek channelization and reconfiguration that's not needed, that costs far more than flood - proofing properties that might benefit from it, and which is such an environmental dog that the Bush I Fish and Wildlife Service and Army Corps of Engineers both nixed it. But it's quietly and behind the public scenes winding its way through the Zone 9 county flood authority, and one of these days will be sprung on you and us. The tragedy of this sort of thinking is the bypass, like the Mississippi River portion of SL Creek by the sewer plant, will require major annual maintenance, and that's where maintenance expenditures will be made, not in the older parts of town that desperately need them. So, you can hope we dodge the KSBY-predicted weekend fiasco, and don't end up facing what we did in 1973 in my neighborhood: n �� RFS' J..dws .rt, -..•� - Broad Street near Lincoln, as flood waters rise and recede. Where cars in previous photo came to rest. House on Broad near Lincoln, today the site of community garden, lifted off its foundation and swept away — a total loss. We need to get back to doing what works — annual flood inspections and maintenance late summer each year. It's a cheap and effective way to protect life and property from unnecessary flood threats. Sincerely, Richard Schmidt