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

The agenda for the upcoming Council meeting includes a recommendation from the City Manager to remove Arthur Plourde from his Commission post for “advocating a personal agenda while representing himself as a City Commissioner.” No further details are provided in the agenda material.

There are always two sides of a story, but Plourde, for his part, believes the City is railroading him out of a Commission appointment due to his desire to keep his “oath of office” requiring him to uphold the Constitution of California.

That Constitution establishes English as the official language of the state. In what Plourde views as a violation of this constitutional provision, he claims the library is “constantly accommodating … requests for books in home languages of immigrants who are supposed to be here as Americans not as travelers.” As evidence of this, Plourde noted that the library right now has “requests for books in Farsi.”

Plourde further went on to say that, “much could be saved in taxpayers money if the Library was not so accommodating … to people who live and work here and refuse to learn ENGLISH. He also queried, “Why should Taxpayers have to put up with this? Even the Torrance Transit has signs on board their buses in Spanish and that is not necessary either.”

It is for pushing this concern with the City Librarian that Plourde believes he is now being labeled a troublemaker and removed from his position. When asked about this situation, the City Librarian declined to comment.

Plourde was appointed by the City Council to the Library Commission only a few short months ago on January 27, 2015.  Plourde, now retired from Boeing, is a well-recognized face within local Republican groups as he has volunteered on the campaigns of several local republican candidates and been active in the Tea Party movement.

The Torrance municipal code does allow the City Council to remove commission appointees by a majority vote of the Council.  Absent further information from the City, however, Plourde’s plight does present an interesting dilemma. It is clearly within the Council’s right to remove Plourde, but should they? What type of precedent will removing Plourde set for current and future appointees?  At what point does expressing your firmly held beliefs, no matter how someone on the Council might disagree, rise to the level of unduly advocating a “personal agenda” thereby necessitating removal?

The agenda for the upcoming Council meeting includes a vote to provide City Attorney John Fellows with a considerable boost to his salary further enhancing what is already one of the most generous compensation packages in the state. Under the proposal, Fellows will receive an immediate 4% increase in base pay with another 4% increase to follow 01 Jan 2016.  The two raises will increase the City Attorney’s base salary from $259,210 a year to $280,368 a year.

Data gathered by the website Transparent California reveals that in 2013 Fellows received $45,053 in direct pay beyond the base salary as well as benefits valued at $68,191 for a total yearly compensation package valued at $372,454. The proposed $21K salary increase will also provide Fellows with a significant retirement benefit as it could add to his pension anywhere from 12 to 15K per year depending on when he retires.

As standard business practice, the City conducts routine salary surveys to ensure pay and benefits are consistent with comparable cities. Despite having not had an adjustment to his base salary since November 2008, Fellows salary remains one of the highest in California and appears considerably higher than other City Attorney’s from comparable sized California cities.  Indeed, Transparent California shows that only the City Attorney from Santa Monica had a higher salary than Fellows in 2013.  Additional data obtained from Transparent California shows the following for City Attorney base pay for cities near to Torrance in population size:

• Huntington Beach City Attorney Base Salary: $214,864
• Escondido City Attorney Base Salary: $225,505
• Sunnyvale City Attorney Base Salary: $210,642
• Orange City Attorney Base Salary: $191,421
• Pasadena City Attorney Base Salary: $225,33

The proposed increase for Fellows comes on the heels of several legal settlements that have depleted Torrance’s legal defense fund. The Daily Breeze reported in fact that legal fees escalated so much recently that late last year [2014] more than $1.6 million from the city’s operating fund was transferred to a reserve fund to pay for the “influx of unanticipated settlement claims over the past two fiscal years.”

One of those cases settled in early 2014, in which the City paid nearly $2 Million to a Police Officer tasered by his supervisor, only recently came to light after an inquiry led by the Daily Breeze.  Responding to why that settlement was not disclosed to the public earlier, Fellows was quoted as saying “It wasn’t done intentionally…we’re not trying to hide it. We’re just not trying to publicize it. It’s a fine line.”

Ironically, the proposed increase to Fellows salary comes on the same night that the Council will meet with legal counsel in a closed session due to yet another significant exposure to litigation.

Updated data provided by the City reveals that McCormick is operating in breach of the emergency services contract they secured with Torrance after a controversial decision by the City Council to award them the contract last November.  That decision led to locally owned Gerber Ambulance, the previous emergency transport provider for the City, recently closing it doors after nearly three decades serving the residents of Torrance.

McCormick was the only evaluated bidder for the contract that committed to meeting Torrance’s requirement of an 8 minute 92% of the time emergency response. City staff cited that commitment by McCormick as a key differentiating factor in scoring McCormick higher than the other offerors. After several months of evaluated performance it appears, unfortunately, that McCormick is not living up to that commitment.

The data provided by the City included 775 completed “911” emergency calls received in the month of January 2015. Of those 775 calls, McCormick had a response time above the 8 minute requirement on 103 of them for an on-time response rate of 86.7%. Of those 103 late responses, 13 of them took over 15 minutes.  One call in particular took McCormick an astonishing 54 minutes to respond. The data set includes 60 calls where response time data was not provided. If you assume McCormick was on-time for all of those calls, the on-time percentage only rises to 87.7% – significantly below the 92% requirement.  Data was also requested for the month of February, but it was not provided by the City.

As a reference point, Torrance Fire Department (TFD) submitted a notice of default letter against Gerber ambulance for failing to meet the response time requirement. In that letter, TFD cited Gerber’s average response time of 88.9% over nearly a two year period as cause for their default.

Gerber was also blasted by public officials for failing to implement a CAD to CAD interface link with Torrance’s computer aided dispatch system. Councilman Weideman cited that issue as a key reason for ruling in favor of McCormick and was quoted as saying, “If the customer says ‘You have to integrate with our systems as part of the contract,’ you have to do it.”  McCormick is also now in breach of that same requirement as City officials confirmed they have yet to complete the interface even though they were contractually required to do so within the first 90 days of the contract.

Gerber was able to achieve a 88.9% response rate even though it was standard practice for them to be called “code 2” (no lights and sirens) to the scene almost exclusively. Rumors have persisted in the community that TFD has allowed McCormick to respond “code 3” (lights and sirens) more often in order to aid their response times. Torrance stopped short of providing information that would clarify the issue, despite a public records request specifically requesting the data, by responding that they do not keep statistics on whether the ambulance is called Code 2 or Code 3.

McCormick’s continued non-compliance to the contract leaves the City in an extremely awkward position. Many councilmembers cited Gerber’s non-compliance with the contract as justification for making the award to McCormick. Councilman Rizzo even suggested to one blogger that Gerber’s non-compliance opened the City up to huge liabilities. Given those concerns previously aired toward Gerber, what should the Council do now that McCormick is in breach of the contract for the very same reasons and has response times that are worse than Gerber’s?