Council: Railroad crossings,
Vactor truck, SPPD residency rules on agenda
April 17, 2015
By Peggy Kelly
Santa Paula News
The long, bumpy road to getting troublesome railroad street crossings fixed, an update on an upcoming financial examination, expanding residency requirements for police officers and whether to sell the city’s vacuum truck will be the major issues faced by the City Council at Monday’s meeting.
The April 20 meeting will start with a 5:30 p.m. closed session where council members will continue the evaluation of City Manager Jaime Fontes at the City Hall Administration Conference Room.
At 6:30 p.m. the meeting will continue in open session at City Hall Council Chambers. The session will be broadcast live on Time Warner Cable Channel 10 and replayed according to schedule; the meeting will also be live streamed on the city’s website and archived for viewing on demand.
Interim Public Works Director Brian Yanez will offer a presentation on the state of drought emergency declared by Gov. Jerry Brown and the mandates created for water conservation.
Although listed on the Consent Calendar — those items considered routine and not warranting discussion — no doubt the proposed sale of the city’s Vac-Con Vactor truck will be pulled for discussion as its heading notes.
The proposal is to sell the truck — Ventura Regional Sanitation District has offered to purchase it — for the sewer pipe maintenance service the city has contracted out for years. The $300,000 truck was initially purchased in 2010 to bring the service in-house, a move that staff said would be a money saver, but one that was never made.
The last time the issue surfaced was in March 2012, when a majority of the then-council balked at selling the Vactor and asked that a study be done on the cost to have the work done by hiring two employees, preferably those that had been let go in a Public Works layoff. The contract cost at that time for the service was $250,000 annually and the council estimated the city might save $100,000 by bringing the job in-house. A study was never brought back to the council.
Probably not warranting discussion on the Consent Calendar is the new scoreboard at Harding Park’s Thomas Moore Field, a project funded by the park owned property leases that pay directly for park needs.
In other business, the city will address the long-plagued railroad street crossings issue. According to the staff report $1.1 million in federal funding cannot be used for the teeth-jarring railroad crossing fixes that the city first stated would be used for repairs, but now notes is the responsibility of railway owner Ventura County Transportation Commission.
Residents have long complained about the crossings and the damage to their vehicles but the staff report notes that the $1.1 million grant was to repair bike trail pedestrian crossings only as well as to construct a shade structure cut from the original project due to a then-lack of funding.
Staff is recommending that the city spend at least $425,000 to repair the worst railroad vehicle crossings at Cameron, Steckel and Dean Drive using city money; the $1.1 million grant will be retained for the original project to repair pedestrian crossings and create a shade structure on the bike path.
In other business Frank Catania will present an update on the fiscal review he is conducting of city finances; Mike Sedell, the former city manager of Simi Valley, recommended Catania to review city books. Sedell is not charging the city for his services to help with goal setting and budgeting. Catania, who had been Sedell’s assistant city manager, is charging about $12,000 plus incidental expenses for the review, expected to be presented to the council in May.
Lastly, the council will be asked to remove the mileage residency requirements for Santa Paula Police; residency has slowly edged up over the years to the present 40 miles, but Chief Steve McLean is asking the council to switch the requirement to a no more than a 1 ? hour commute, or what should be approximately 90 miles with good traffic conditions. The 40 miles the SPPD presently requires stretches into Los Angeles County to the east and south and Santa Barbara County to the north.
