City Beat - citybeat's Blog - Bakersfield.com

Westside Parkway speeds up

Bids were so low on the Westside Parkway that Alan Tandy is getting excited about building it faster.

Phase I is building Mohawk over the Kern River. Phase II was going to be the parkway itself from Truxtun near 99 to Coffee, but now they're looking at pushing all the way out to Calloway on the next shot, and with an interchange, not an at-grade crossing, at Calloway.

Tandy said he wants to be in position for Bakersfield to claim money if Congress decides to stimulate the economy with an infrastructure program. That means having projects ready to go.

(Sorry about the quiet these past weeks. I've been posting over on Politics Anyone about the Florez-Gilmore race, which was kind of a big deal.)

Baseball in Bakersfield

Harvey Hall doesn't say much at council meetings, but he opened his mouth again last night, even going so far as to ask city staff for a report on how to keep baseball in Bakersfield.

(He also committed a minor gaffe in the process, one that's sure to derail his campaign to be Commissioner of Baseball — he referred to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the former and cooler name of the team now known simply at the Rays.)

The city has plenty of other such private-public relationships — the arena, home to hockey and basketball, and the movie theater underconstruction downtown.

What do you think? Is the prospect of an evening at the ballgame (at a shiny new not-Sam-Lynn park) worth it?

The Weir recall: It's over, but it's not over

Here's the short form of Will Winn's statement: We're going to keep an eye on Ken Weir and we're going to run someone against him in two years. And we're going to donate our leftover money to Habitat for Humanity.

Here's the long form:

On behalf of the Committee to Recall Councilman Ken Weir, I want to convey my sincere thanks to:

•    The many volunteers who gave up their days off, evenings and weekends to gather petition signatures for the recall – even in the relentless 100˚+ heat and poor air quality of the southern San Joaquin Valley.
•    The many individuals and organizations who generously gave funds, large and small, towards our effort to recall Mr. Weir.
•    The many from outside and inside Ward 3 who called and emailed their encouragement and support for the recall effort.

We have had great satisfaction in going to homes throughout Ward 3, talking with many citizens. Walking the streets of the 3rd Ward gave us opportunity to personally present the past and ongoing reasons for our efforts to recall Councilman Weir. And, we also were able to expose his feeble attempts to mischaracterize what we were doing, to justify and cover-up his illegal acts, and his strong-armed political tactics to change the city’s planning process by manipulating the planning commission.

Even though 20,400 people are registered to vote in Ward 3, many of them readily admit that they do not vote and have never paid much attention to local politics.

The “official” recall has reached the end of its 120-day signature collection period. However, the recall effort is not ended. Our committee has decided to shift the “official” recall effort into an unofficial recall mode – pointing to the fall 2010 general election when councilman Weir will probably apply for reelection.

This simply means that we are going to transition our present effort into a 3-pronged process between now and then.

1.    We will continue to carefully scrutinize Councilman Weir’s public actions on the city council, his committee performance, and his possible conflicts of interest in business, professional and political relationships.
2.    We will try to keep the ward three voters apprised of Mr. Weir’s financial support which has previously revealed his bias towards uncontrolled development, growth and sprawl.
3.    We will seek to recruit qualified candidates to run for the council seat of the Third Ward, which is vitally important when actively working to unseat and replace Councilman Weir in the fall 2010 election.

On a positive note, we recognize Councilman Weir’s recent good effort to convene two town hall-type meetings. However, the public notification for both meetings was woefully inadequate and the meetings themselves were set without reasonable consideration for families’ schedules. One of the meetings conflicted directly with a well-advertised important public forum concerning the Big West refinery that impacted the very same people in western Ward 3.

Councilman Weir’s attitude and misdeeds are not just isolated to him. There are others in local government who share guilt for the fiscal and planning problems of the City of Bakersfield.

Therefore, we will continue our efforts to expose any façade of fiscal conservatism in favor of special development interests – not making development and growth pay for itself, and passing on the economic impacts of development to the Bakersfield taxpayers, such as voting to place a 1% surtax on our PG&E bills. And, by not raising development impact fees adequately in the past, and misappropriating or shifting operational revenues to support out-of-control development, the city has accumulated tremendous deficits and an inability to match thomas roads improvement project’s funding.

We will anticipate additional political schemes to make up that deficit by watching for innovatively deceptive efforts to charge more new fees and to increase the sales tax without the required voter approval. This is neither fiscally conservative nor supportive or friendly towards hard-working families.

We will also continue to expose some council member’s misguided concepts of personal property rights which are actually selective personal property rights – rights for themselves and their friends, but not for small and middle income families’ needs when the city has neglected its oversight, mismanaged and misplanned.

We will continue to monitor any efforts on the part of city council members and their roles on the planning and development committee to undermine or eliminate the hillside ordinance with its reasonable development and building requirements – designed for the public’s safety, with needed trails access and the recreational enjoyment of the Kern River and the bluffs region.

The members of the city council and city staff need to put in place cutting edge, urban planning policies and procedures that will produce a better attitude and philosophy towards development and growth.

To that end, the general plan must contain provisions which will control speculative growth and sprawl – addressing the genuine need for projects and shutting off the selfish and greedy side of profit-making.   Urban growth boundaries and area population limits must be prudently set to force building and development infilling. And, zoning must become more absolute with little room for change and conditional uses.

Everyone needs to better recognize the economic value of open space. And, we need to understand that open and agricultural land is tax revenue positive for our city as opposed to the tax revenue negative impacts of subdivisions. Over 100 studies across the nation show this.

The process to recall Councilman Ken Weir began as a non-partisan grassroots effort and has encompassed and included the active interests of many people from widely diverse political backgrounds. Councilman Weir has tried repeatedly to mischaracterize this by saying we were started and manipulated by unions and environmental extremists. That is blatantly untrue. After beginning the recall, some of the recall volunteers, people who had union and environmental interests, did call to lend their support. To insinuate that they have no right to do this is un-American and is an attempt to disenfranchise these folks. This recall has never been anything other than ordinary citizens, people who separately and personally saw and finally became fed up with councilman Weir’s unacceptable hidden agendas, misstatements, actions and attitudes. The motivation to come together to recall Ken Weir came from him.

In closing, because of the generosity of many, the financial health of this recall committee has always been excellent, and we have ended with a surplus that we will be donating to an excellent cause: Habitat for Humanity.

Thank you for your kind attention, and I will be glad to take and try to respond to your questions that will probably start with,”how many signatures did you get?”

Will Winn, co chair
For the volunteers and Committee to Recall Ken Weir

Block walls made of gold bricks

I suspect that I've only scratched the surface in my investigation of the bill one man faced for repair of a block wall.

One difficulty I faced is getting a handle on how much these repairs normally cost. I went out to the locations of several other wall repairs detailed in the Gonzalez bills, but there was only one other location where I could be sure that these particular bricks were the ones replaced.

Have you ever faced a huge bill from the city? Have you ever had to hire a mason for block wall repair? Is Richard Jennings' story unusual? Please tell!

"Bakersfield" man touts cred on Staten Island blog

Go to this forum on Staten Island Live and click on post number 13700.

How many ways can you find that prove this guy is making things up? I found three things really fast:

1. He claims to have run as a Democrat for city council, even though it's a non-partisan race.

2. He ran every two years, even though it comes up every four years.

3. He ran in the primary, even though there is no primary election.

I got alerted to this by a guy from Staten Island who wanted to check him out. Then I pulled up the city's list of former council members, and his name showed up nowhere.

Why Couch voted no

You may recall that City Councilman David Couch was the sole vote against the Traffic Impact Fee hike adopted last week. I finally grabbed him just now and asked why.

He said he's for the impact fees, but he doesn't like the one-year discount, in which the fees will be 10 percent less, because the council could extend that in a year, and then a year after that, and the year after that, and....

How the state budget affects the Weir recall effort

As part of the budget deal, there will be a statewide special election in March. They picked the date because it was on the election calendar, and Los Angeles already has a mayoral election scheduled.

In the unlikely event that the recallers make up all their lost ground and come up with the signatures they need, the recall election could then be consolidated with the state's, saving the city some of the $80,000 or so that the election would cost if it were standalone.

Council approves development fee at end of late session

The Bakersfield City Council approved increasing traffic development fees in a 5-1 vote shortly before midnight.

The proposal called for raising the city's traffic impact fee to $12,228 per home for the first year and $13,595 the year after that -- although the council council decide next year to extend the "economic stimulus" that the lower first-year fee represents.

The fee won't affect any project that already has vested maps or is under review. That means the estimated 35,000 homes approved during the boom, but not yet built, would typically pay $7,066 per home. Projects already submitted but still in the pipeline for a zoning change -- such as the 1,334-home Canyons project -- would pay $9,553 per home.

Councilman David Couch cast the sole vote against. Councilwoman Sue Benham had left the meeting.

Couch predicted that the council will be asked every year to extend the economic recovery period, no matter how many units are built.

But Bakersfield City Manager Alan Tandy said there's a real value in the economic recovery period. He said he hopes it will spur commercial development to act quickly, thus helping accelerate the economic recovery in the area.

Public Works Director Raul Rojas said the fee will pay not just for freeways, but for the city's whole $2 billion transportation program. That includes $556 million for new lanes on existing roads. Freeways, such as the Westside Parkway and the TRIP projects, total $736 million.

The traffic impact fee is slated to pay for 65 percent of the $2 billion. The TRIP earmarks pay for 20 percent, with other taxes and grants filling in the difference.

Debbie Moreno, president of the Greater Bakersfield Chamber of Commerce, said the fees are saddling the buyers of new homes with the burden of paying for the mistake the city made in past years.

But Tandy said the city is coming up with other sources as well — gas tax, money from Kern County, state grants and now a utility surcharge.

He said developers are trying to come up with an argument that makes them sound "victimized."

Resident Will Winn called the adoption "bittersweet," because he supports the fee but wishes the council would have increased the fee years ago, so that development would have paid for the needs it generates.

"It's too little, too late," he said.

Public commenter pushes Harvey Hall's limits

Will Winn (you may remember him from the Ken Weir recall) got up to speak during public comment tonight. His topic was the topic du jour, the fee increases aimed at filling the city's road-funding gap.

He started off by talking about how our current financial crisis is due to the "greed and materialism" that fueled rampant development and the housing boom. He said the traffic fee, likely to be approved tonight, is "too little, too late."

At about three minutes ten seconds, Mayor Harvey Hall interrupted him, as he normally does — "your three minutes have expired, please bring your statement to a close."

Winn said he had one minute to go. Hall's frown deepened.

Winn kept talking. And talking. At five minutes, Hall said he'd consumed two minutes past the one minute he said he was going to use. Winn said he had just one more statement to go, then continued on to consume a total of five minutes and thirty seconds, for a three-minute statement.

Ken Weir hosting community meetings

I've heard Ken Weir is hosting some community meetings this week:

• Saturday, 10 a.m.-noon, at Thorner Elementary
• Tuesday, 6-8 p.m., at Discovery Elementary

Some people have gotten flyers in the mail. If you're a Ward 3 registered voter, have you gotten the notice?