City requests public opinion on city manager recruitment 

As voters we can only hope the city council makes the right choice this time around for city manager. The responsibility is on the 5 Council members. Whalen and Kempf need to be checked. Alex and Mark need to join Member Weiss. No more hires that lie to police officers, mis use power and defame residents. No more showing favoritism to certain developers. Stand up voters, let your voice be heard!

Due to the complex commercial developments needed for parking, tourism and retail only someone who has been a CEO with stockholder and P & L responsibilities should be hired. Political and career ‘public service’ floaters need not apply, they only tax and spend.

Eric, I think you’re probably right, a reset button, a reboot/recalibration regarding our perception of governance succession itself in Laguna is intuited.
In the wake of WWI, French Premier Georges Clemenceau advised his countrymen that war is too important to be left to the generals.
We’ve been through a local political war, some of our general’s heads seem on the chopping block, including staff and Council positions in jeopardy, and perhaps more will follow post-litigation.
Perhaps repeating previous search/selection mechanisms, even with the warm and fuzzy, deceptive empowerment optics of public participation as now, is like that Einstein quote: Expecting a different result is a form of insanity.
Since 2 of the 5 that hired the previous, disastrous CM, are involved, seem to be able to convince wafflers Orgill or Rounaghi to vote for their Siamese Twin agenda whatever it may be, isn’t this anticipated 3 vote disposition already a foregone, controlled conclusion?
Surveys, workshops, etc., are just old school ways to placate the hoc-polloi. Keep the teeming hordes occupied by imitating true democracy, it’s camouflage.
Well paid PR flacks use this tried and true method as a form of vox populi fraud. Make it look like it was a fair screening process (nudge nudge, wink wink).
Whalen & Kempf are monarchists, and their elitist sycophants will follow lock step.
What they’re trying to sell as a process really isn’t.
Like little Meggy on the Simpsons, riding shotgun with Marge in her faux driver’s seat, her steering wheel doesn’t really control the car, and the horn is just another distraction to soothe and entertain while in transit.
Meanwhile, as I unfortunately learned in my early years as an activist, community-wide IGNORANCE & APATHY reign supreme.
They are the driving engines, not intelligent, careful, decision tree methodology I experience and take part in daily as a pro analyst and consultant.

The Laguna Beach General Plan is a contract between the city of Laguna Beach on behalf of residents, and our California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. Let’s choose a City Manager who updates, honors and executes the GP requisite actions to meet the goals therein and a City Attorney to enforce those requirements. Let’s see the executive search firm produce a candidate sworn to meet our requirements in statute.

Les:
I think you, like I, committed, dedicated/volunteered many hours of your life uncompensated, took part in the 2000 LBCC-led VISION 2030 fiasco as you’ve mentioned it many times here and at your website?
My NGO, the Clean Water Now Coalition (shortened in 2011 to just CWN), was there from launch. 3 of my founding BOD & I attended the Environmental Sub-Committee religiously: Briggs Christian (Corky) Morris-Smith co-founder of the LB Chapter of Surfrider; Scott (Woody) Woodard, So Cal WQ rep for The Whaleman Foundation; and Michael Hazzard who had taken over my 1st NGO, Clean Aliso Creek Assn., on my behalf.
When we reported to the LBCC a year or so later, each sub-committee had memorialized our collective 30-year vision and timeline, where LB should be. It was collated, bundled and delivered at a marathon meeting.
Hopeful, what were we thinking?
In retrospect, it now seems so obvious: We were snookered, it was never meant to be productive, just get the petty whiners and pesky troublemakers to go away for a while, leave the LBCC basically alone in Chambers.
The CC in open session bluntly admitted that their mantra when faced with complex problems was “Just make it go away,” as if concerned community members were temporary nuisances (think mosquitos or fleas), distracting them from their feudal state dominion’s entitlement.
Activists are like children, send them out of the room, “go do your homework, Johnny/Judy,” keep the boisterous riff-raff busy while the CC worked in a cloaked, separate reality, a parallel “adult” universe.
And btw, never in my 26 years of local political awareness (1997—) have I observed Village Laguna/SLCA or any other liberal NGO wield real power, control the CC, rule with an iron fist as has been alleged in the last 6 years. Classic straw man gaslighting a lá Trump.
CWN certainly had no affiliation or association with VL/SLCA/Greenbelt/LCF et al, our water quality awareness successes (which were many) were ours without their participation, actually in spite of them.
Frankly, they were superfluous to our agenda, by 2005 we were out making a difference as watershed watchdogs in all of South OC.
We saw local NGOs as beholding, as ineffectual, too passive, herbivores or omnivorous at best. We were different because we were carnivores, took no prisoners. We didn’t stand before LBCC as vassals, hats in hands, asking for compliance.
Many LB-based NGOs had attorneys in their midsts, yet inexplicably (since our founding anyway) never filed a CEQA, Class Action lawsuit to benefit all of Laguna, that could have headed off and buffered over-development—reasonable or sustainable growth, not blatant rampant commercialism, turning us into a monetized gimmick.
CWN stepped out and stood on the firm ground of federal and State laws, ordinances and regulations, didn’t rely upon political whims and trends.
Back then, myopic and not yet burned/totally cynical, we took our collective feet off of the gas pedal, gave the Vision 2030 a year or 2 of attenuated/lessened local pressure because we believed a middle path was possible.
By 2003-4, it became apparent that the City was, to use a basketball or football metaphor, in a “prevent defense,” a strategy reserved for when you’re ahead.
It’s Whalen & Kempf who’ve acquired the stranglehold, coalesced and concentrated the power at the top of the pyramid they’ve erected, selfishly for themselves and their supporters best commercial interests.
So Les? Don’t hold your breath, the political weather forecast is for yet more betrayal and zero chance of trust.
Hope, like thoughts and prayers, is not a deliverable, so this canard, this “recruitment,” is by design, and like the General or Specific Plans, an excellent candidate for mischief by amendment or variance.
This is a form of community “brand erosion,” little-by-little, piece-by-piece, dismantling and negating the building blocks of hope here in advance.
When the public servants come to believe that they’re the masters, it’s game over, the community pulse clock has run out.

An overwhelming majority of residents and even decision-makers who are appointed and not credentialed don’t know that CEQA isn’t just about individual projects, analyzed in isolation: It includes concepts like “piecemeal/sequential filings,” assessment of the significance of an accumulation of projects, determine if their interaction/overlapping effects need to be addressed as agreed upon exactions/concessions, i.e., as project approval mitigations that lead to nil or less than nil impacts when completed.
Item XVIII (Mandatory Findings of Significance) on a CEQA Initial Study checklist applies, this isn’t just a “catch-all” §, btw. This is also where projects can be “fast-tracked, pre-approved” via internal manipulation by governance members.
Whether it’s the local CEQA administrator/lead agency, or the utilities (as in most instances), they KNOW the future “patterns of development” before projects even hit the public record radar screen.
Often years in advance, what’s planned to go where, many can straddle/overlap HOA or Specific Plan domains, thus ringing no alarm bells.
Commercial ones @ the Planning Commission, DRB often is the first glimpse for residential, these bodies are a type of triage, first stages of disclosure after staff may have been reviewing and holding private meetings with applicants and their vendors for many months or more as I wrote.
This isn’t illegal or all that unusual: It’s the way the processing, CEQA digestive system is set up, k?
Individually, impacts by project seem minor but be incrementally (en masse) considerable when added to/summed up individually, or to others in the vicinity: Effects of past projects, the effects of other currently being considered ones, and the effects of PROBABLE future ones.
I capitalized PROBABLE because that’s where oversight usually fails the general public, especially neighbors. Many don’t find out until officially notified, meanwhile the project has “ripened” totally off the radar screen.
It might SEEM like they popped like Diana full grown from the head of Zeus, but they didn’t.
So development build out in any zone isn’t rigged, but it does favor political forces who only order staff to turn over “cards” (projects) one at a time.
Impacts can be direct or indirect btw, more wiggle room but in this instance CEQA could favor opponents.
Hope I clarified, CEQA can be a friend, a foe, or some jurisdictional tool in between.
Often the Coastal Commission, when facing development disputes, throws up its collective hands, convenes a DE NOVO (as if new) hearing, and thus becomes a de facto CEQA lead agency.
CEQA DOES, however, also allows for direct, 3rd party intervention/relief via courtrooms.
There are several here in OC Superior Court who specialize, albeit a small but important pool of judges like Ms. Kim Dunning.
And that adjudicated relief CAN come via class action or individual civil filings, including injunctive Relief, in many instances to avoid clogging up the legal system, the parties involved are strongly encouraged to sit for 30 days (or more) to at least try to arbitrate/negotiate.
This CAN lead to further imposed prohibitions and restrictions…..catching project proponents BEFORE they break ground is critical.
Otherwise, in some instances, the court will order expensive bonding by the plaintiff, both parties arguing who has been damaged most by delay, which outweighs the interests of the other, etc.
No, I’m not an attorney nor have ever purported to be one, but as a 26 year activist-cum-consultant, I’ve gotten a lot of OJT regarding both sides of the equation.
Unfortunately, once, like the Canyon, the over-development rock has been kicked off the ledge, subsequent corporations use the first as a precedent to support theirs. Then the avalanche, the domino-falling cascade is difficult to fend off.