Politics & Government

Laguna Beach Village Entrance Project: Why FEMA Won't Bail Us Out This Time

GUEST COLUMN: Plausible deniability is alive and well regarding the VEP, but people are starting to speak out.

By Roger E. Bütow

I get bored on summer re-run Tuesday nights, so occasionally I watch the Laguna Beach City Council (LBCC) meetings broadcast live on cable TV for an unscripted, hysterical laugh or two. Or 10. Last night the LBCC lived up to their unfortunately perennial, farcical depth of unintentional hilarity.

Often, LBCC meetings more closely resemble Abbott & Costello’s infamous “Who’s on First?” routine. Last night was a stellar example of that metaphor, and watching City Manager John Pietig (a.k.a. “I Don’t Know” playing 3rd base) dodge, duck and cover was just the tip of the scandalous iceberg that’s being slowly yet carefully and meticulously revealed.

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As the layers are getting peeled back, more serious and alarming interrogatories, not less, are being produced by residents of every ilk concerning the Village Entrance Project (VEP). Legitimately provoked, detailed answers remain ignored and unaddressed. The more inspection, the more of a disaster-in-the-making, runaway train wreck this project resembles.

As locals began drilling down, trying to understand the revenue model and physical implementation lapses, what’s emerged like the actual invasive digging required is a pig in a poke. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it remains a homely pig nonetheless.

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All Lagunans should be proud. Brave locals did their civic duty last night and asked incisive questions about the VEP. Questions about apparently intentional informational omissions by city officials that are disturbing in their capability (and culpability) to cause undisclosed massive cost over-runs and physical mayhem. Sticker shock.

As the July 16 hearing unfolded, I watched the initial Public Comments portion with rapt attention and in personal fascination. I had been tipped off that several members of our community were going to confront city officials regarding those major environmental lapses and other unanswered, unresolved, burning questions about the fatally flawed VEP.

Why is the Proposed Village Entrance Project Site Physically and Fiscally Risky? 

I’m a Libertarian myself. This is a non-partisan, divisive issue as reflected by the flummoxed people who have contacted me personally about these two columns and their content.

I had also tracked other concerns of frustration and outrage as expressed in various local media, both guest columns or forums plus letters-to-the-editor since the VEP financing package was approved by our myopic elected officials on June 11, 2013.

I had received and answered numerous direct inquiries about my columns, and apparently many in our community are beginning to wake up: It’s mourning in Laguna Beach. Not the early A.M. glorious sunrise type, but bereavement over how little time and effort was spent analyzing the potential adverse impacts and their eventual sticker price for taxpayers.

I didn’t catch all of their names, but I wrote down Alan Boinus, Audrey Prosser, Vic Opincar and Rita Conn as parties who definitely deserve citizen watchdog awards and accolades. They exhibited what America is about: The right to confront government and demand a redress of grievances. And make no mistake: Grief is what’s coming from this poorly-planned box store for visitor’s cars.

Mr. Opincar is a very bright, highly respected, retired civil engineer who brought up the incredible Operation & Maintenance costs (O & Ms) that such gargantuan garages like the VEP will require.

His points, in my mind, add to the contention that ONLY the downtown district commercial cabal wants this convenient monstrosity because it won’t show any profit for the hoi-polloi or add anything significant to the general fund coffers. When a crime occurs, the detectives are taught to first ask “Cui bono?” (To whose benefit was the crime committed?). Ask yourself that, what do you think?

If the glorified garage is not packed 24/7/365, it might in fact lose money each and every year until it collapses in the anticipated earthquake. It will become an expense, a liability, and not an asset. So far, I haven’t observed one person other than parties representing downtown interests in support of the VEP as is. Nor others outside that zone in rapture about the obscenely huge sums and the ostensible but nonsensical funding mechanisms progressed thus far.

Unlike the city staff or the three LBCC members who voted to move forward, the patient Public Comments speakers had done their homework, and it was obvious that an informed group represents a dangerous and serious threat to obfuscators and spin doctors. It was hunker down and circle the wagons time at this rodeo.

Make no mistake, the VEP is a fiscal and physical sieve, to quote Gertrude Stein, but in a different context: “There’s no there, there!”

The “poker tell,” the tipoff, came after the public spoke. Councilmember Toni Iseman and Mayor Pro Tem Elizabeth Pearson asked City Manager Pietig to respond to the speaker’s VEP issues. Suddenly, he quite conveniently had amnesia regarding the true depth from the surface of the downtown aquifer. He couldn’t remember details about the Senior Center problems over a proposed subterranean parking level that revealed groundwater levels and unmapped coastal streams. The proverbial you-know-what was hitting the canyon’s alluvial fan at the VEP.

Pietig begged off with the usual bureaucratic nuance “I’ll have to get back to you on that, I’ll look into it, etc. etc.” He was in the middle of these projects all along, undoubtedly knew the answers to these ladies’ questions and those triggered by the public last night. Like a turtle, he pulled back, went into damage control via buying time and distance from providing hard answers.

Plausible deniability is alive and well in Laguna Beach. But will that excuse work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA? Or work with the California Emergency Management Agency, CALEMA? They eventually helped bail us out several times up in Bluebird Canyon and more recently after the 2010 Laguna Canyon flood, but we basically begged, and it took quite some time to get reimbursed for most (not all) of our expenses.

Now that this project’s design flaws and gross misplacement have been dragged kicking and screaming into the daylight, the emergency agencies have good reason to “Just say no!” when that structure pancakes during the anticipated 7.0+ seismic event predicted by experts. Our fiscal distress will be self-inflicted hence avoidable. Built in a dominantly sandy loam soil zone, straddling the aquifer, therefore quickly becoming the quicksand, as myself and now many others joining me have pointed out.

The undisclosed or low-balled water quality pollution and soil contamination remediation eventual expenses are horrendously large and unlimited ones, the liquefaction impacts potentially catastrophic to life and limb (plus pocketbook), plus the income revenue model arguably false and inaccurate. The list gets longer not shorter as we learn more.

The Department of Transportation (Caltrans) doesn’t want the VEP placed there, RBF Consulting advised a peripheral site or sites (as originally proposed but rejected). So the city did a Cleopatra: It shot the messengers and kept spending our money until it found a consultant that would rubber stamp, would ratify its pre-disposed, pre-determined central district location.

The common mantra expressed last night, “Let Laguna Vote,” should be viewed as the inspirational launching, the kick-off of an unprecedented intervention: We need to save ourselves because the present leadership won’t, it doesn’t recognize (or refuses to acknowledge) the cul-de-sac rabbit hole into Wonderland that it’s taking us down.

Whether by coup d’etat (recall) and/or by ballot initiative, someone needs to put a halt to this blank check madness.

As for the speakers who expressed concerns, who sacrificed their personal time (and professionally humbling themselves before the media) to assist their neighbors? They  should be congratulated. We have enough poseurs and bogus heroes who pin medals on their own breast-beating chests. This was challenging fortitude and community valor on display.

I encourage readers of this posting to do their own research. Everyone probably knows a land use planner, architect or engineer. Or knows someone who does. Review the information available, peer review the deconstruction of an unworthy project that’s been placed before you. Talk amongst yourselves, share the glaring holes and discrepancies, the disparities, the misinformation and propaganda promulgated at City Hall. You’ll get mad as hell too, I guarantee it.

Harkening to the hallowed invocation of that seminal New Wave band, DEVO, Laguna needs to wake up and smell the coffee about this de-evolving fiasco -- in this case, a really bad project, in a poorly situated location, knowingly insinuated deeply into calamitous soil and hydrology conditions: “It’s not too late…to whip it. Whip it good!”

Roger E. Bütow is a 41-year resident and local builder. He’s also a land use and regulatory compliance advisor. He can be reached at rogerbutow@me.com or at his home office: 949.715.1912. 


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