“Your decisions today are not final,” City Manager Marcella Marlowe explained. “You have another opportunity to see how this looks to you once you see the whole budget.”
None of the proposals stoked much — if any — controversy last week, and that they were relatively small purchases shows how far the city has come in recent years in terms of modernizing both its physical operation and streamlining the process by which budget policies are handled. Many of them involved longstanding tech issues with the city that are being cleaned up — such as year three of a five-year computer replacement program, which in the 2021-22 fiscal year is slated to cost around $36,000.
As another example, there are the server rooms in City Hall and the Police Department, which have 15 years of deferred maintenance saddled onto them.
“It’s basically spaghetti over there,” Parks and Public Works Director Michael Throne deadpanned. “It’s starting to become problematic when they need to trace wires and do maintenance because they don’t really know where any of the wiring is going. It is proposed to sort all of that and bring it into, ah, current organizational methodologies for wiring.”
In addition to labeling issues, the Police Department’s server setup currently obstructs access to the water heater closet, which could become an issue should the heater cause water to flood the area. The proposed fixes, at $7,000, follow a recent upgrade to the cooling systems to these servers.
“It does look like my garage and that’s a scary place,” Councilwoman Gretchen Shepherd Romey joked, “and this is much more important to the city.”
The Police Department also hopes to use a grant from the Department of Homeland Security to outfit its newer vehicles with automated license plate reading cameras. Stationary cameras of the sort have been used throughout the city this fiscal year and have yielded a number of arrests for stolen vehicles as a result.
Councilman Steve Talt, an attorney, wondered whether this would invite any legal issues for the city.
“I know the ACLU loves them,” he quipped.
Police Chief John Incontro didn’t seem to think it would be a problem for the city, outside of customary requests for videos for legal cases.
“There could be public records requests,” he said. “There will be discovery requests as we go to court, but we will provide the footage from the cameras for court purposes as we would any other piece of evidence.”
There are also a number of vehicle replacements slated for the upcoming year, including a new battalion chief SUV for the Fire Department slated to cost $50,720. It would replace an older vehicle with more than 75,000 miles on it. The Fire Department also is hoping to use approximately $56,000 to upgrade its mobile radio system.
The Police Department is hoping to use part of another grant — this time, from the South Coast Air Quality Management District — to purchase two new vehicles for his department’s detectives. The current two vehicles are repurposed patrol vehicles and, as Throne pointed out, unconvincing as unmarked cars. The vehicles would require around $11,500 total to outfit them with the necessary equipment and lockboxes and receiving the $70,000 reimbursement from the grant.
This item, like most of the others, seemed good enough to bring into the budget.
“If we can give the Crown Vic to the Blues Brothers, I think they’d be happy,” Vice Mayor Susan Jakubowski decreed.
City Council Considers Upgrades to Benefit Police, Fire Depts.
