BLUE FOLDER ITEM
Blue folder items are additional back up material to administrative reports and/or public comments received after the printing and distribution of the agenda packet for receive and file.
CITY COUNCIL MEETING
MAY 30, 2023
J.1 PUBLIC PARTICIPATION ON NON-AGENDA ITEMS
PUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS
From: Warren Chun
To: CityClerk
Cc: Bill Brand; Mike Witzansky; Ted Semaan; Kelly Orta; Paige Kaluderovic Subject: Add Public Commments for Non-Agenda Item for May 30, 2023 City Council Meeting Date: Thursday, May 25, 2023 9:34:36 PM
Attachments: Franklin Park Letter 2023-05-25.pdf
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Good Evening City Clerk,
Please add the attached Letter-Pdf for Non-Agenda, Public Comments to the May 30, 2023 City Council Meeting.
Sincerely,
Warren Chun
May 25, 2023
Dear Mayor Brand, Paige Kaluderovic, Council Members, Mike Witzansky, Ted Semaan, Kelly Orta, Public Works Commission, Recreation & Parks Commission, and City Staff, Thank you for all you do for your work on making Redondo a great city to work, live, and visit.
I have been a resident of Redondo Beach for 23 years and in District 3 near Franklin Park for 12 years. I have seen the development of the area surrounding Franklin Park these including: Anastasia development on 190th, the Foundry, and most recently the Friendship Foundation. I worked with many of you on issues relating to Franklin Park, the stake park, pickleball courts, and while I served on the Budget & Finance Commission (2016-2020).
Attached is a letter signed by 66 residents and users of Franklin Park that was sent in 2022. The letter and signatures are appended to this letter as a reminder and to new Board Members. It is also important because of the development of the Friendship Foundation. The letter also includes the original plan design of the park in 1989 which included direct input from the residents where we desired:
1. No organized play areas aside from the basketball and volleyball courts.
2. Basketball hoops to be opposite facing.
3. No ballfield lights.
4. No shrubs.
Most recently, the site footprint for the Friendship Foundation moved pushed into the park, reducing the park size. Many people were quite surprised by this as the park loss additional space.
It is very important that Franklin Park keeps its unique character along with original design/intentions.
Franklin Park needs to keep the open spaces open. Any additional trees will encroach on the already limited open spaces.
If there are any plans to plant trees, please do not plant trees:
1. Along the border of the Friendship Foundation (yellow lines in map below).
2. Open spaces (red boxes in map below).
3. Any open space, especially on or around the mounds.
If there are any planned changes or uses to the park, please reach out to the Franklin Park community first to get our input.
Sincerely,
Warren Chun
From: Mark Nelson (Home Gmail)
To: CityClerk
Cc: Sheila Lamb; Gale Hazeltine; Gwenn Godek; Douglas Boswell; Robert Gaddis; Matthew Hinsley; RDG Update Subject: Comment #1 - RDG revision
Date: Tuesday, May 23, 2023 8:12:10 PM
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Mayor, Council, Planning Commissioners:
Planning states "Guidelines in the 2003 Design Guidelines that cannot be translated into Objective Standards have been removed and the Objective Residential Standards apply." Basically, Planning admits that it simply removed the RDGs that were subjective but functioned effectively for 20 years when it failed to translate those guidelines into objective standards.
The Planning Department has taken the easiest, yet worst performing path for property owners as it attempts to update the prior RDGs. Planning is attempting to develop so-called "objective" guidelines from subjective criteria when convenient. Public comments have been made to use descriptive statistics, statistical distributions, and other objective measures to assure compatibility, common character protection, mass, volume, view block, among other damaging attributes, are avoided in new construction or significant modifications. However, those suggestions were discarded and instead that which was too difficult was jettisoned instead of being retained as subjective.
Just because a task is difficult, doesn't mean it should be ignored. Furthermore, the obvious alternative after failing to develop objective criteria is to leave the subjective ones in force in order to protect other property owners from wholesale development chaos. There is ample time to replace them with objective standards in the future when the work has been completed. For now, the existing standards in those areas are far superior to NO STANDARDS as Planning has proposed. That approach has also been suggested in comments.
Planning has removed the strongest criteria in the multifamily residential and the results will allow developers, such as the Catalina project, to have their way with surrounding property.
That is clearly not the intent of the RDGs, nor it is appropriate for the billions of dollars of existing property to be degraded due to a lack of standards.
Further detailed comments will follow, however, this is the basis of largest defect in the current proposal.
From: Mark Nelson (Home Gmail)
To: Mark Nelson
Subject: Egregious Government Spending in Redondo Beach, CA Date: Tuesday, May 23, 2023 12:32:35 PM
Attachments: image.png
BCHD RFQ (1).PNG
BCHD Bike Path Overheads as of 12-31-22.png
BCHD Bike Path Overheads as of 12-31-22.png
BCHD RFQ.PNG
BCHD Executive Costs.webp
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Beach Cities Health District (BCHD) in Redondo Beach California is planning to spend roughly $6,000 per linear foot to create a bike path that it named the Diamond Street Bike Path Project. The 1400 block of Diamond Street in Redondo Beach (Diamond Street east of Prospect Ave) consists of six single family dwellings and is approximately 200-feet long.
According to Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority documents, BCHD has already spent over $400,000 on it's own internal staff and costs, as well as, consultants as of December 31, 2022. That amount could be substantially larger as of May 2023. BCHD's recent Request for Qualifications from contractors states that the estimate cost of construction is $800,000 for the roughly 200-feet of bike path.
The total cost of the 1-block, Diamond Street Bike Path Project is therefore estimated at $1.2M, or $6,000 per linear foot. According to a UNC Chapel Hill study of bike path costs, the range from low-to-high costs is $17 per foot to slightly over $100 per foot. As a further comparison, the California Policy Institute shows estimates of a single lane freeway addition to cost only slightly more than $500 per linear foot.
While it's clear that a health district has no expertise nor experience in road construction, it is simply unfathomable that an organization with $2.3M annual payroll of executives managing fewer than 60 full-time employees has failed to complete sufficient due diligence to realize the excessive and egregious project costs that it plans to foist upon taxpayers.
Clearly, when a project is 60-times the cost of a university study's 'High Cost" case it's is an indication that something is dreadfully wrong. The scope of work may include deferred maintenance that is not part of the project, the location may simply be a poor choice, or the developer (in this case a Health District) is simply unqualified or fiscally irresponsible.
I encourage the media, consumer advocates, local cities, community groups, and taxpayers to review and publicize this as an example of government waste and assert themselves in this obviously flawed process.
Mark Nelson
Redondo Beach, CA
From: Mark Nelson (Home Gmail)
To: Judy Rae
Cc: CityClerk; CityClerk
Subject: LTE - Easy Reader - How can BCHD spend $1.2M on a bike lane that only goes past 6 houses Date: Monday, May 29, 2023 12:59:37 PM
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BCHD is spending $1.2M of our tax money on a 200-foot long section of bike path on a one block dead end of Diamond Street that goes past a total of six homes. That cost is about $6,000 per foot when the California Policy Institute states that adding a freeway lane is just over $500 per foot. How can BCHD charge taxpayers 12-times as much for a bike lane on an existing road and alley than Caltrans would charge to add a lane to I-5 on the way to San Francisco? Thankfully Torrance had the common sense to deny BCHD's attempt to add more bike lane all the way to Beryl Street. That's 12-times as long, and we can't afford another $12M of BCHD overcharges to taxpayers.
Mark Nelson
Redondo Beach
Public Comment: Torrance and Redondo Beach City Councils From: Frank Briganti
To: CityClerk
Subject: New South Bay Bike Path Connects More Residents To Beach Cities | Redondo Beach, CA Patch Date: Saturday, May 20, 2023 10:54:58 AM
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Hi can you please forward this to all depts involved? this is Torrance property-Flagler Ln* not Redondo! Thanks frank briganti. ** why this false story? https://gcc02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?
url=https%3A%2F%2Fpatch.com%2Fcalifornia%2FRedondo&data=05%7C01%7CCityClerk%40redondo.org%7C3ab6e7c61b66473173e908db595b5076%7C08ea6101a7cb4984aff676e3d00172df%7C0%7C0%7C638202020974000183%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=1c2%2BpPXohBm0dPlRrzVY1KRe03VD85P%2FW0Lk5JCFz9E%3D&reserved=0 each/new-south-bay-bike-path-connects-more-residents-beach-cities Sent from my iPad
From: Mark Nelson (Home Gmail)
To: Communications
Cc: info; Holly J. Mitchell; Kevin Cody; Lisa Jacobs; Tyler Evains; Garth Meyer; CityClerk Subject: Public Comment - Just how high cost of a provider is BCHD? Date: Sunday, May 21, 2023 7:10:51 PM
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I can't help but wonder if BCHD is the highest cost provider of EVERY service that it provides.
Anyone with ANY experience in construction over the past 30-50 years was taught the old rule of thumb that a concrete highway lane costs $1M a mile to build. That's about $200 per linear foot. Updated for inflation, that number is now around $2.5M a mile, or around $500 per linear foot.
Never were we taught the BCHD cost of bike lane however. BCHD is proposing to pay a contractor $800,000 to build about 200-feet of bike line from Prospect & Diamond to Flagler Alley. That comes out to $4,000 per linear foot. When you tack on BCHD's outrageous executive costs, overheads and consultant fees over over $400,000 on the project so far, that's now $6,000 per linear foot, or 12-times more than building a freeway lane.
At 16% of revenue for executive payroll, we know that BCHD is a very top heavy organization spending $2.3M of the $15M in gross revenue on executives. Each director level executive has on-average only 5-6 full time employees. That span of control is foolishly small.
What other high costs is BCHD hiding? BCHD bike lanes are 12-times the cost of a freeway lane. That's malfeasance.
cc: Public Record Comment City of Redondo Beach
From: Mark Nelson (Home Gmail)
To: Brandy Forbes; CityClerk; Sheila Lamb; Gale Hazeltine; Gwenn Godek; Douglas Boswell; Robert Gaddis; Matthew Hinsley
Cc: Lisa Jacobs; Kevin Cody; Holly J. Mitchell; [email protected]; info Subject: Public Comment - Planning Department, City Council, and Planning Commissioners - BCHD is spending $6,000 per linear foot on Redondo Beach bike path
Date: Sunday, May 21, 2023 1:12:31 PM
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BCHD has posted an RFP for the approximately 200-feet of bike path from Prospect & Diamond to the Flagler Alley terminus of Redondo Beach property. The RFP is valued at $800,000 for 200 feet, or $4,000 per linear foot for a bike path. That does not include the more than $400,000 that BCHD has expended on project planning. Including planning, BCHD's bike path segment in the City of Redondo Beach is $6,000 per linear foot. By any measure, that is an absurd cost metric for a bike path, or even for a full lane of interstate highway construction.
According to the California Policy Institute, adding an extra lane to a non-urban freeway (such as the 5 in the central valley for example) only costs $511.36 per foot, or $2.7M per mile. At BCHD's $6,000 per foot rate for its bike path, it would cost more than $31.6M taxpayer dollars. Clearly no government entity is auditing the process or cost of BCHD's hyper-cost work.
BCHD is generally inexperienced in construction, has no road construction expertise, and has spent over $400,000 of Measure M funding on BCHD executives, overheads, and consultants without building one single inch of bike path so far.
If the City plans to permit this project, then the City needs to have public hearings and we need to reduce the cost by a factor of ten to twenty to efficiently use Measure M funds in Redondo Beach.
cc: LA County Board of Supervisors, Metro Inspector General, media "adding a new lane to an interstate on flat terrain in a rural area costs $2.7 million per lane mile"
From: Mark Nelson (Home Gmail)
To: Todd Loewenstein; CityClerk
Subject: When was the public hearing or public notice on BCHD"s use of Diamond Date: Tuesday, May 16, 2023 3:53:19 PM
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Mayor, Council, Planning Commission:
BCHD has gone out with its usual press release flurry, this time about a 200-foot strip of Diamond that they plan to turn into a bike path with no public notice or meetings, even to those who live ON DIAMOND.
As you know, the Torrance residents soundly rejected the bike path on Flagler and in Flagler Alley when they had the benefit of public meetings. This quite clearly appears to have avoided public review.
I am not surprised at BCHD's behavior, but, I expect more from the City.