HomeMy WebLinkAbout6/20/2017 Item 13, Schmidt
Purrington, Teresa
From:Richard Schmidt <slobuild@yahoo.com>
Sent:Monday, June 19,
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:budget hearing item 13
June 19, 2017
RE: Item 13 – budget -- North Broad Park Funds
Dear Mayor and Council Members,
I urge you to maintain the entire $900,000 park acquisition down payment fund for the long-promised North Broad
Neighborhood Park as promised residents by the Council just a year ago.
Removing funds from a specific parkland acquisition fund for extraneous purposes is a betrayal of the City’s word, and the
frequency and consistency with which promises are broken of late is one of the key reasons why week after week you
face so much public rancor and turmoil.
There is no need to rehearse the issues here other than to reiterate that the park need has been publicly recognized since
at least 1970; despite that fact other projects have been given precedence (like a $2 million skate park to replace a
perfectly good skate park because a lot of organized people turned out one night); and the need is explicit in the current
P&R Element so you don’t need to do any more studies on this subject.
The funds that have been proposed for removal from the parkland acquisition fund are for updating the P&R Element,
presumably to manipulate the outcome so a North Broad Park is no longer a need. I would comment on this use of these
funds as follows:
1. General plan element updates are customarily financed from general funds or grants. No previous general plan
element update has been financed by stealing from a reserve fund set up for parkland purchase or any other CIP
project.
2. The proposed cost of the update is ridiculous, and results from a most unintelligent process favored by your current
city manager – turning staff into consultant managers rather than expecting them to do actual work. Consultants drive
up costs, are insulated from the demos, and produce inferior work. I have personally been deeply enmeshed in
numerous general plan updates, including 2 LUEs, a CE, and multiple HEs, and ALL THOSE BUT ONE HAVE BEEN
DONE IN HOUSE AT MINIMAL COST BUT MAXIMAL PUBLIC OPENNESS AND PARTICIPATION. THE “ONE”
EXCEPTION – an LUE no less -- WAS DONE BY A TALENTED CITIZEN COMMITTEE WORKING IN FULL PUBLIC
VIEW WITH GENTLE STAFF ADVISEMENT. You must wake up to the exorbitant cost and complete undesirability of
your manager’s hiring consultants to do almost all the city’s actual work. Why do we even have staff if consultants must
do everything?
In any event, I can see your P&R Element update costing peanuts and popcorn if done in house instead of by the
method the manager proposes – and being a more community-responsive product as well.
I thank Mayor Harmon and Councilmember Pease for supporting the full retention of the park fund.
I appeal to Councilmember Gomez to realize that his swing vote made possible an outcome that’s both bad politics and
bad public policy, and to join in preserving the entire amount of the allocated parkland acquisition fund.
Thank you Aaron,
Richard Schmidt
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