Torrance City Council – A Town Hall Style Conversation About Local Politics

With much of the focus on the recent election here are several noteworthy items from the local scene you may have missed.

Mom Replaces Son

• Patrick Furey Jr who resigned from his position on the TUSD Personnel Commission was replaced by his mother Teresa Furey. Patrick’s father, now Mayor Furey, had held the same post prior to his son. Teresa Furey was appointed to the Commission by the California School Employees Association (CSEA) Chapter #845. She is currently listed on CSEA’s website as its First Vice President. The Personnel Commission was established to ensure favoritism and nepotism are kept out of the District’s hiring practices and that employees are hired based only upon demonstrated ability and not on who they know. Teresa’s appointment was approved by the School Board in October.

Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) Moves Forward

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  Joe Galliani – Local Environmental Activist

  The formation of a CCA took another step forward with Torrance becoming the first local City to approve participation in the South Bay Clean Power Advisory Committee. The Committee will solidify plans to create a CCA by forming a local JPA with other cities, work on a business implementation plan, and draft an RFP for financing and the necessary services to create the CCA. According to its website, the South Bay Clean Power Advisory Committee is chaired by local environmental activist Joe Galliani. Galliani has been a leading proponent of creating a CCA over the last several years.

Tree/View Ordinance Nearing Completion

• After what has seemed like a never ending series of community meetings and Council deliberations on the subject that have occurred over the course of the last several years since Mayor Furey took office it would appear that a final ordinance is nearing completion.  At a meeting held in October, the Council considered a draft of the proposed ordinance and directed staff to return with a final version.

Ordinance Regulating Short Term Rentals in Work

• The Council once again took up the issue of short term vacation rentals offered through various avenues such as Airbnb. The Council had previously considered an outright ban of such enterprises. With litigation surrounding such bans cropping up in other jurisdictions it appears the Council will opt for some form of regulation versus a ban. At a meeting held late October staff was directed to return to Council with a draft ordinance for consideration.

Let’s start with a simple fact – the City of Torrance constructed an elaborate and well-coordinated plan to implement street sweeping ticketing as a revenue scheme. A small group of us have proven that through city emails and other documents. There is no more debate on that subject and we encourage everyone to read the overwhelming evidence proving our case.

We have two very strong reasons to continue to make a call to action by our fellow citizens. First, it should be deeply troubling to everyone that city officials not only lied to us, but did so repeatedly in a coordinated effort. There is a complicity of action by multiple members of our city government that creates an overwhelming sense of “us against them” in the way they aggressively subjugated honest and sincere citizen complaints.  There is no room for that sort of thing in a democracy. For those of us who are not political, and that includes virtually all of the citizens involved in exposing this lie, it is very hard to believe that local officials would mislead us so openly.

The second theme involves our two respective neighborhoods.  Early in this debate, Councilman Griffiths expressed his concern that city-wide ticketing would take something away from Torrance that we shared with only a few of the South Bay’s most attractive cities, the sense of uninterrupted calm where we live without the unnecessary stress imposed on residents by a ticketing program. To put some numbers on that, we will have more than 20,000 new signs (a blight of sign pollution) and nearly 100 times a year to get a ticket on either side of our street.  Those numbers might look like dollar signs to our city officials, but to us they are a crass violation of sacred ground, our homes and neighborhoods.

Seaside Ranchos and Hollywood Riviera are considered two of the most beautiful and desirable parts of Torrance and there is a reason city officials left us last for their implementation. They are taking something very special away from our areas that does not exist in other parts of the city. In fact, many people consider our neighborhoods to be a kind of alluvial extension of the lifestyle and architectural beauty of neighborhoods found and admired in the peninsula cities. So, why are Seaside Ranchos and Hollywood Riviera residents not fighting harder to expose this false program and take back our right to self-determination in the places we live?  These are our neighborhoods and we should have a right to govern them.

Go examine the gutters and surface between the connector streets where Torrance has implemented ticketing and those streets where they have yet to do so.  See any difference? That’s right, there isn’t any, because the current program is very effective and far exceeds minimum standards without a single ticket or sign.  For those of you on the edges of Torrance nearest the Peninsula cities, you are going to see the same thing. When you look up and down your defaced street full of signs and watch that officer writing a citation, consider that residents just a few houses away in the next city or perhaps on the other side of a horse trail will never experience that undesirable scene or the anxiety of realizing they forgot to move their car.

But wait a minute — many of the storm drains in the Peninsula cities empty into the same drains as Torrance, why aren’t they required to post signs and ticket their residents? After all, our city officials told us that “we have no choice in this matter, we don’t like this any better than you do.”

The answer is because there are no requirements in any state, federal, or county mandate that force the city to implement this ticketing program. It was designed by the City of Torrance to produce revenue and they have gone to extraordinary lengths to hide that fact. Our neighboring Peninsula cities value the beauty of their neighborhoods too much to plant thousands of ugly signs in the front yards of their citizen’s properties. And they stated that they have no plans for ticketing, even though they are subject to the exact same regulations as the City of Torrance.

The citizens of Seaside Ranchos and the Riviera are about to be blindsided by city officials who will extend this false program into your daily life.  They have already arrogantly allocated $1 million of your money to guarantee that process. Some of us have fought this program for two years with little help – and this has been a battle that reinforced the saying “You can’t fight city hall” in ways that would disgust the average citizen. If you do not like being lied to and want to preserve the beauty and stress-free heritage of our great neighborhoods, we urge you to join this fight immediately. Read the facts, voice your opposition as loudly and often as possible, and call for a full investigation of Torrance’s efforts to mislead us.

Citizens Against Government Waste

October 2016

I will start with a question: What is it going to take to get the people of Torrance to start paying attention to the mismanagement of their City?

The few of us who attended the August 24^th Torrance City Council meeting witnessed the worst political thuggery any of us have ever seen in those chambers, as the full force of city staffers, Council Members, and the Mayor ganged up on the few remaining opponents to their fabricated “optimized” street sweeping and ticketing plan.

Councilman Mike Griffiths, the lone opponent on the council, took the brunt of the attack. His mistake – he asked a few questions about the significant revenue being generated by this falsely labeled “optimized” plan. This is a scheme that at least three separate watchdog groups in the city have proven to be nothing more than a money grab, with no real environmental impact. But transparency in the City of Torrance has a different set of rules.

Torrance has an uncanny way of packaging its most unpopular decisions so that the fewest number of people can oppose them. Citizen investigators of the City’s secret refinery additive deal are getting the latest version of this duplicity and misdirection, something the rest of us have experienced with increasing distaste for years now. Change the schedule; combine the staff notes, public discussion, and vote in the same session; make up and hide data — that is what “The Torrance Way” looks like in 2016.

Mr. Griffiths accurately pointed out that this ticketing program in full force will generate over a million dollars a year in revenue. In case anyone has forgotten, this is the same program that has been consistently described as “revenue neutral” by City officials. We won’t even try to explain the fuzzy math that one staffer used to describe a 237% increase in tickets as a decrease.

To his credit, Mr. Griffiths did manage to trap the City Attorney in an embarrassing admission that their dire warnings of street pollution fines were based on a spill in their own City yard. A few of us spoke, but the chamber was essentially empty, and that is where the real problem lies. Is no one else paying attention to the actions of the bureaustocracy that has taken over this city?

This shameful display highlighted a simple fact – the City of Torrance ceased being a democratic institution a long time ago, and is managed as a self-enrichment program by a clique of insiders, elected and unelected. Just check the lopsided 6-1 votes on the council, every time city employee fortunes are at stake.

Still not convinced? Did you know that Torrance’s Police Chief and Fire Chief are paid more than the Director of the FBI, the Director of Homeland Security, the head of Cal Fire, and similar chiefs in New York City and many other major U.S. cities?  To put that in perspective, the NYPD has 34,500 personnel, Cal Fire has 4,500, Torrance PD has 347 and Torrance FD has 163. Does it bother anyone that our City Attorney’s base pay is greater than the salary of a Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court? Those are pretty lofty numbers for a city that doesn’t even rank in the top 30 largest cities in its own state.

And this problem isn’t going to go away. We have an astounding 258 employees making (with benefits) more than $200,000 per year, with more than half of the staff (585) exceeding $100,000 annually. Torrance’s pension obligations now top $2.0 billion (ten times the city’s annual budget) and the unfunded liability is an unknown, though we know it spiked to $392 million back in 2012, making it one of the highest per capita in the United States. These are crushing debt levels that may not lead to bankruptcy just yet, but guarantee reduced services for decades to come.

If you wonder what the fallout from this self-enrichment program is, just take a look at our city streets and other facilities, which are in the worst condition in city history, even with the recent flurry of resurfacing and repair. And by the way, some of those improvements came from the one-time $10 million windfall when Torrance sold part of itself to the City of Rolling Hills last year.

This is a frustrated open call to the people of Torrance from the very few of us who have taken the time to act on your behalf. When you look at the 20,000 new signs that will deface our neighborhoods or pay that ticket on your windshield, you can pretend that this was ever about the environment, if you like. But those of us who know the truth will see these signs for what they are – a stealth tax arrogantly planted in the places we live by uncaring officials who no longer represent us.

Democracy isn’t a right, it is earned through vigilance and action, and we need more of both in the City of Torrance. Join us in demanding the truth about this ticketing scam.

Citizens Against Government Waste

September 2016