The new majority on the Huntington Beach City Council is getting started on priorities laid out during the slate’s recent successful campaign, packing several items on its first meeting agenda for Tuesday, Dec. 20.
The four new council members, Mayor Tony Strickland, Grace Van Der Mark, Casey McKeon and Pat Burns, have said they made a “contract” between themselves and Huntington Beach voters for issues they would address “day one,” including fighting state mandates such as housing requirements; implementing a 90-day plan to clean up streets and “combat homelessness;” building up the police force and cracking down on crime; and address red tape to “reward not punish” small business.
“My main agenda item is homelessness, as those are issues that were brought forward by the residents,” Van Der Mark said. “We need to have a fair and open discussion about the most pressing issues. I’m asking for a complete review of the programs we have right now and we want to see all the data and numbers to see what has been working and what hasn’t been.”
The councilmembers will be requesting a full report with monthly data from the city’s Navigation Center, from the time it opened in December 2020 to the present, in regards to the number of patrons and beds and how long stays lasted.
“We’ve been dealing with the homelessness issue for many years and it’s been clear that what we’ve been doing has not been effective,” Van Der Mark said. “We want results at this junction, and this was the No. 1 issue that everyone had in common, was the homelessness and how it’s effecting us.”
The council members are also introducing an agenda item that will be requesting Police Chief Eric Parra to submit quarterly updates on anti-camping and anti-loitering efforts, as well as a proposal that incorporates a 90-day proposal by former Police Chief Robert Handy’s on how the Huntington Beach Police Department could enforce the city’s anti-camping and anti-loitering laws.
Some of the other items on Tuesday’s agenda at the request of the new council members are:
- A new ordinance that would prohibit anonymous complaints by establishing a code enforcement complaint process regarding alleged business violations.
- A request to raise campaign contribution limits in the city to follow limits for state Assembly and Senate.
- Asking staff to provide options for leaving the Orange County Power Authority.
- A request to pause the redevelopment project on Main Street to get more community feedback.
- Authorizing the city attorney to oppose state housing mandates and to work up an ordinance to ban builder’s remedy developments.
Councilmember Dan Kalmick said the city has already done a lot to address homelessness, including enforcing anti-camping and anti-loitering laws and opening its own shelter to provide services.
“I’m not saying we can’t do more, we’re working on that, but I’m not about violating anybody’s civil rights,” he said. “It’s not illegal to be homeless, it’s not illegal to be unhoused.
“We’ve created hundreds of low-income, transitional housing units and we have our shelter open,” he said. “The goal going forward is going to be create more transitional housing along with wrap around services.”
He said he hoped the council would approve two other items on the agenda that would support efforts to go after more grant funding to add supportive housing and help people with behavioral health needs.
Van Der Mark noted that another issue of major community concern that she has heard about is the redesign of the first, second, and third blocks of Main Street.
“We want to look through it once more (the Main Street development project),” she said. “They call it reimagine downtown, and they said they’re going to modernize it. We’ve seen the plans that they have, and a lot of the residents are not happy with them.
“We want to pause what they are doing and talk with the residents and the business and come up with a solution that would work with most of the people involved.”
Kalmick said a lot had already gone into developing the plan.
“Giving people the ability to walk and bike safely downtown without having to interact with cars, I think is a benefit to business,” Kalmick said, especially after seeing the impact of the pandemic. “I think like what Laguna Beach did or Seal Beach did. Cities that were able to reclaim areas that were predominantly for automobiles and give them to the residents and business. The more you can separate people from cars the better.”
Tuesday’s agenda also has several new proposed appointments to city and regional boards, commissions, committees and such. Kalmick noted he along with councilmembers Natalie Moser and Rhonda Bolton are excluded from nearly 40 of the appointments as proposed, and he said he felt it was the new majority acting in “retribution.”
“They have put themselves on every single board and commission but save one, just the four of them,” Kalmick said. “Even with (former Councilmember) Erik Peterson, he and I didn’t agree on everything politically, but he served on boards and commissions. We didn’t pull him off stuff as there’s so much work to do. So this is really a disservice to the community.”
McKeon said that while Kalmick, Moser and Bolton are not being removed from everything, he and his colleagues feel it necessary to make reassignments.
“The voters gave us a mandate to change the leadership of this city and that’s in every single aspect of the city and that’s what we’re doing,” McKeon said.
The council meeting starts at 6 p.m. and can be viewed online live at huntingtonbeachca.gov.
