Nothing changed tonight (June 16, 2015) after the Arcadia City Council voted publicly to stop all work on updating city zoning codes and to continue with a survey of historic buildings everywhere except the Highlands.
Scott Hettrick
It’s been quite an interesting couple of months of City Council meetings that can leave casual observers shaking our heads with puzzlement on a number of levels.
As always, the City Council spent hours upon hours discussing and then approving a $55.7 million budget recently that covers everything from police and fire and public works to parks, library and community services. It goes into effect July 1. As always, these meetings were open to the public. They made major new decisions such as agreeing to spend $250,000 to add two police officers to spend all their time at Westfield Santa Anita mall (this will actually take as long as 18-months to get officers hired and trained for this new beat). They decided to spend $70,000 for a consultant to tell them how to paint a more flattering public image of Arcadia, which has taken some hits from regional, national, and local publications in the past year or so.
And yet, as is typical every year, only a couple Arcadia taxpayers cared enough about how their dollars are being spent to show up to any of these meetings. But when the City Council held a couple closed door meetings last month to discuss whether to halt work on a zoning code update due to a lawsuit filed against the City by Highlands homeowners (they decided to do that on a 3-2 vote) and a survey of historical buildings (they decided to continue the survey everywhere except in the Highlands on a 3-2 vote), it triggered such a huge outcry in local and social media, printed newsletters, and the threat of another lawsuit by the Highlands homeowners, that the City Council decided to negate that discussion and those votes in closed session and reboot the whole thing tonight in open session. So, this is what drew big crowds to the City Council — not quite as big of crowds as discussions about what to do about coyotes or peacocks or even trees. Dozens of people filled a large percentage of the seats and about a dozen people — about eight or nine homeowners — spoke on the topic, or related topics.
In the end, each Council member voted the same as they did in Closed Session and all the votes had the same result. It’s good that the people had a chance to be heard — still not sure why these discussions were held in closed session in the first place even if it was a technically legal thing to do since it wound up costing the Council and City staff a couple of months of time and resources to deal with the blowback and eventually do it all over again in public anyway — but one wonders where these people and other residents are when the Council is discussing issues that don’t specifically relate to something happening in their backyard. Issues that affect them indirectly but perhaps more importantly or even more financially. And certainly issues that affect the community as a whole.
I suppose it’s common for people everywhere to get very passionate and very heated about one or two specific issues — so passionate that they often vote for a political candidate based on that lone issue, or try to recall or run a politician out of office based on a single issue on which they may disagree, not even considering whether that politician was overall effective or maybe even in agreement with them on hundreds of other equally or more important issues.
I guess it’s hoping for too much for people to slightly moderate the things they get so worked up about and spend more time considering even a few other important things that deserve their attention. Communities and countries work best where people are informed, engaged, and participate regularly in their governments.
Oh well, enough time spent on this for tonight, I need to go do something more important than any of this — watch ESPN.
— By Scott Hettrick