Fix Pacifica: City Council Meetings = Waste of Time

Monday, October 26, 2009

City Council Meetings = Waste of Time

Just finished watching the Pacifica City Council meeting on the web. My Pacifica Net connection was pretty bad so the proceedings were hard to follow, but from what I could make out, lots of time was spent on feel-good, save-the-world environmental issues, with zero time spent discussing ways to improve Pacifica's economy and financial situation. Same-old same-old.

Pacifica City Council - asleep at the wheel. Again.

10 comments:

ian butler said...: Au contraire, even if you don't care about the environment, you must admit that voting to negotiate a new waste contract with Recology and recover the hundreds of thousand of dollars that Coastside owes the city is not a "waste of time".; October 26, 2009 at 9:57 PM
Frogger Ebert said...: Ian:

I happened to be watching the City Council meeting on TV26 tonight and caught a bit of your show beforehand. I loved the "random" person on the street interviews regarding term limits which you held at the Fog Fest. What are the odds that you would just happen to run into high profile PSD stalwarts Fred Howard and Dyer Crouch for the anti term limit interview? Of course, for the pro side of the issue, you really did find "random",unprepared citizens. Come on, if this were a true random sampling you wouldn't have been able to claim the public is evenly split on the issue. Yet another example of your objective video reporting. LMAO@Ian!; October 26, 2009 at 10:55 PM
Kathy Meeh said...: A picture is worth a million words, Fix Pacifica Editor, you captured the meeting perfectly. I think city council must have made a resolution a few meetings back and banned the entire range of those "economic development" words from their Curtis et al approved dictionary forever.

Ian Butler was quite delightful talking about the replacement of polystyrene containers, but seemed shocked that Fix Pacificans (he mentioned Jim Wagner) are not only economically responsible but also environmentally responsible. The entire concept blew-over city council's head anyway.

Actually I was there mainly to put-in a good word for Coastside Scavenger and Chris Porter. Some people have forgot what consistent, great service we do receive for trash pick-up. Chris did mention the main reason the price is higher here is because we have limited commercial and retail base to off-set cost. Reason for another big "love letter" to Riptide, "our environment is our economy".; October 26, 2009 at 11:49 PM
Steve Sinai said...: Ian, I was the one who posted the original comment. Even though money is at stake with the Recology/Coastside Scavenger issue, I consider it more of a salvage action or bureaucratic necessity that the city is forced to deal with, than any kind of initiative that would improve Pacifica's financial situation.

Due to the bad internet connection, I was mostly just listening to snippets of the meeting in the background while doing other things, but one thing that really stood out was when Mary Ann (I believe) was talking about the little plastic bits in facial scrub. I was thinking to myself, "With all the problems this city is facing, we're spending time discussing the critical issue of plastic bits in facial scrub?" It just seemed awfully surreal to me.

Later in the meeting, it sounded like Jim was talking about how impressed other cities were with Pacifica's global climate plan. Again, I was thinking, "Who cares? What does that have to do with tangibly improving Pacifica?"

As I said on Wavelength, Pacifica is a city and not a chapter of the Sierra Club. We need to be concerned with surviving as a city, and not be so focused on tangential, save-the-world environmental projects. While making a few people feel good about themselves, those do nothing for the city except distract it from what I consider to be more important issues that have a direct, tangible impact on the city.; October 27, 2009 at 12:21 AM
Unknown said...: Ian, you are certainly judgmental this morning. Because people disagree with going straight to a new waste contract without going through the RFP process, they are anti-environmental?

I do not know all the details but that seemed like a blanket statement against everyone you disagree with.; October 27, 2009 at 7:40 AM
ian butler said...: Frogger Ebert,

You are correct that the Fog Fest interviews on my show weren't random. We first tried random people but they all were from out of town, so we then asked people we recognized. But with the exception of Fred Howard, I didn't know what people's opinion would be until I asked them. One of the interesting things about term limits is that it doesn't follow the usual left/right division, so there is no way to know someone's position beforehand.

Anyway the goal of the segment is to show both sides, so even if we hadn't gotten such a balanced response, I would have tried to show a more or less even sampling. And for the record, Bernie Sifry said that in his signature gathering efforts, support is running around 50%.

As for Styrofoam, I asked about a dozen people their opinions, and all of them were in favor of a Styrofoam ban. That included people like Mike Durkin and Jerry Crow, whom I asked because I thought they might be against it. Since everyone's response was pretty much the same, it would have been a very boring segment, so I didn't use it.

I consider it promising that the only complaint you had with my show was that it was too balanced.

Lois,

You completely misinterpreted my post, perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I was responding to the original post that the entire City Council meeting was a waste of time because all it did was focus on saving the world, and I was pointing out that the Recology deal could also save our city a lot of actual money, in fact we already got a check for $100,000 from Recology.

I don't consider favoring the RFP process anti-environmental in any way.; October 27, 2009 at 8:05 AM
Jeffrey W Simons said...: The PCT26 website has always been a bit slow when broadcasting meetings, and last night was pretty bad. I thought it might have been my internet connection, but someone should drop an email to Marty Anaya and let him know . . .

Email PCT26; October 27, 2009 at 9:05 AM
Jeffrey W Simons said...: sorry my html is pretty bad this week:

pacificatv@sbcuc.net; October 27, 2009 at 9:09 AM
mike bell said...: We should start keeping track of how much time is spent on "feel good" proclamations and honorary awards.....where as, where as, where as. These meetings are insufferable time wasters. By the time they get through all of the proclamations, self congratulatory special awards and grammer school styled show and tell stories about all the meetings attended there is hardly any time or energy left for the people's business.; October 27, 2009 at 2:06 PM
Anonymous said...: Lois, regarding the new scavenger contract, this isn't a redo of the franchise agreement -- it is the sale of Coastside Scavenger. Any company coming on board will have to abide by the existing franchise until renegotiated. I'm sure the City will have something to say ahead of time to assure the City's interests are covered. In fact, I would guess the City will be in a better position when all is said and done because the new company will make good on the past obligations, if they still exist at the time of the closing. I think Coastside is making an effort at this point to bring it all current. ~~~Flo; October 29, 2009 at 8:24 PM