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Approximately 12 people were in the audience during the Monday, March 24m City Council budget study session. Some of them were members of the Seal Beach Cable Foundation board. (See “SBTV-3 requests upgrades and a manager,” page 1) Others commented on the city’s financial situation.
There will be public workshops on May 6 and 8. No budget workshops were scheduled in April as of editorial deadline.
Comments
One of the people who spoke to the council on March 24 said they got a notice about the 5:30 p.m. meeting on that day. The man identified as James said he was looking forward to knowing what the council was doing to watch the budget.
Teresa Miller said she could not read “microprint,” apparently referring to the hardcopy print outs of the slides from the staff presentation. “So all this was not to my advantage at all,” she said.
Miller suggested that at future special meetings the printouts would be available in advance so people could read them and have comments.
She said city goal number five should be number one.
She was referring to the nine goals presented at the start of the meeting. Goal number five was “Promote and Enhance a Strong Local Economy.”
“Everyone should be thinking about Seal Beach and the revenue coming in,” Miller said.
“It is unfair to have it all sit on the backs of residents all the time for everything,” Miller said.
“Your goal list was yes for City Hall. Then you have to ask yourself when you’re making the goal, how does it affect the Seal Beach residents? How does it affect the quality of life of the Seal Beach residents? How does this impact costs to the Seal Beach residents, not how it affects City Hall and all the things that are good for the group here,” Miller said.
She said she saw the video on the budget process and assumed that the public was paying for that “because we always have a consultant for everything,” Miller said.
In an April 1 email, Arenado wrote: “The City did not incur any additional costs for the creation of the budget process video. We utilized a current staff member, who contributed to the project during periods between other ongoing tasks. Additionally, we leveraged the City’s existing software tools to create the video.”
“Is it necessary? Probably not,” Miller said.
(Earlier in the meeting, during Finance Director Barbara Arenado’s presentation off city goals, Arenado said: “We strengthened budget transparency through the introduction of our new budget video in addition to public study sessions ensuring greater accessibility and understanding of the budget process for our community.” )
“There are nine businesses closed on Main Street, but that’s not the only business center we have,” Miller said. (As of Tuesday, April 1, the CBD store on Main Street closed its doors and moved to a Los Alamitos location. This brought the number of empty retail spaces on Main Street to nine.) She said Seal Beach had the Shops at Rossmoor and the Target center.
She asked who looks after the health of the businesses in those centers.
“Because they’re not doing very well,” Miller said.
“There’s two drug stores right across the street from each other,” Miller said.
“Go in one of them, it’s pretty empty. They’re not contributing to the financial success that we hope to have in order to have a balanced budget to have a viable budget going forward,” Miller said.
She questioned the need for street sweeping. “It goes down our street too and it’s not clean,” Miller said.
She said the city had to look at contracts to see the necessity of them.
“Orange is going to do an audit in our city. Why? Because they have no public trust. I don’t think we have any either,” Miller said.
“We don’t see people that are running the city out very often. We do see our council members occasionally,” Miller said.
She said the meeting was online Friday. She was apparently referring to the agenda.
“Who’s seeing that? Nobody.”
“You can’t rely on social media, everybody’s not seeing it, you can’t rely on SBTV, we don’t even have SBTV in my home,” she said.
Miller described the city website as “atrocious.”
(Earlier in the meeting, District Four Councilwoman Patty Senecal said the website could use an update.)
Miller said AI was easy. “There are people who will do it for a fraction of the dollar,” Miller said.
She said the economic vitality of the city is paramount.
Matt Terry had questions about asking questions.
“This meeting was kind of presented as a way to ask questions. If I ask a question would one of you be able to answer it or is this one of the things where you guys have to stay silent for 5 minutes?” Terry asked.
Someone said they could answer his questions. Terry said he had lived in Seal Beach his whole life. “One of the great memories I had as a kid during summer was doing summer camp at McGaugh and then closing the day off with swim lessons at the pool there,” Terry said.
Terry said he has to look for a summer camp for his daughter. “Trying to do that in Seal Beach is pretty much impossible,” he said. “Swim lessons are very limited now. They used to run later. There used to be more options.”
“If I want to do an all-day summer camp there’s, I think, maybe two options in Seal Beach,” he said.
“I can’t do swim lessons afterward,” he said.
He wanted expanded times for swimming lessons.
“Who covers the cost of road maintenance between Seal Beach Boulevard and Valley View?” he asked. He said he was talking about Westminster Boulevard.
Public Works Director Iris Lee said that part of Westminster Boulevard was paid by Seal Beach.
“Same with Seal Beach Boulevard?”
Lee confirmed that was correct.
“Does the Naval Weapons Station contribute any funds to that?” Terry asked.
“No,” Lee said.
He said he would think that would be budget issue number one.
“Normally the whole concept of having a street and all the utilities on it is that you have street utilities and then you have businesses and activities on both sides that contribute tax dollars and whatnot to the maintenance of those streets,” Terry said.
“We are significantly hampered because half of our street produces no economic activity,” Terry said, apparently referring to Westminster Boulevard.
He said there was no money coming in for that street and the city has to pay to maintain it. “That’s a big loss,” Terry said.
He suggested having the Navy base contribute to the cost of maintaining the street.
He also suggested rank choice voting to save money on elections. “If you want to save just a little bit of money, the city budgets about $50,000 per election,” Terry said.
“There’s five every four years for us,” Terry said.
According to Terry, sometimes a candidate runs unopposed. “But if you do ranked choice voting, you’ll never need to worry about runoff elections,” he said.
According to Terry, the contingency money that the city budgets for elections wouldn’t be needed.
The budget study session, which lasted about one hour and 19 minutes, had to adjourn so the council could hold its regular meeting later that evening.
