San Diego Infrastructure Committee Meeting Summary: December 4, 2017

Well good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us for today's special meeting of the uh Committee on Infrastructure.

Today is December 4th, 2017.

Let the record reflect that we are uh joined here by a full compliment of the committee, including Vice Chair Ward and Councilmember Zaf and Gomez.

We also have our City Attorney Representative Christina Ray, our IBA Representative Gillian Cassie, our mayor representative Alejandra Gavalden, and our infrastructure committee consultant Lee Friedman.

I'd like to thank the members of the public who are with us today or watching on City TV.

We will start with non-agenda public comment.

And we do have apparently uh one member of the public who would like to speak, and that is Catherine Rhodes.

Please come forward, and you have two minutes.

Um hello.

And I wanted Catherine Rhodes from Point Lema and I want to talk about what I call potential fraud in the fiscal year 2017 San Diego Housing Commission comprehensive annual financial report, and then it'll probably be for your other report also.

And the reason for it um is because you're hiding, you know, you're hiding assets, revenues, um, and how it relates to the CIP budget.

Um for the CIP, you know, you you're talking um you guys actually are doing so much better than you did before.

One thing I was so happy about is that you guys kind of acknowledge you had hoarded funds all this time, you had hundreds of millions of dollars in cash sitting around.

And what's great is that you um staff is no longer trying to push these um deferred capital bonds on you guys again because you don't need to pay all those bank costs because you have so much cash cash in the bank.

So I'm um very uh thankful for that.

Um the other thing is that um every CIP per state law, every CIP project requires um a construction start date and a construction end date.

And it could only be three years maximum.

It can't not only eighty-five percent of it has to be three years maximum, all the um funding through your CIP projects need to be three max three years maximum.

Another thing I thought what would be um that I would recommend that you do, and for your multi-year, you know, budget and budget moderating for CIP is actually use the sand egg um templates that they use for their projects.

What you can see there is a multi-year, there's just so much good information.

And then also um what's uh and of course what what my main issue that I come here around is that you know, even in the infrastructure, you're using some of the successor agency redevelopment bonds.

But for all the fund balances, including um, you know, all of these, you don't tell us what the start balance was, the expenses of revenues.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That concludes non-agenda public comment, turning to committee comment.

Would any member of the committee like to make comments at this time?

Vice Chair Ward.

Thank you, Chair Kercy.

So um wanted to raise an issue today that um particularly came to me from Mission Hills constituents, but I know I have talked about generally uh I certainly am grateful for a lot of the road work that we are doing and our commitment to try to achieve a thousand miles of repaving soon, but we also want to make sure that quality management is uh on top of our uh our minds as this work progresses.

Um there's just been, I think, an increasing number of really unacceptable um conditions, unacceptable performances with regard to some of this work.

Uh in Mission Hills, we have heard from a number of constituents about the recent street resurfacing and in particular North Mission Hol Mission Hills uh is being described as having been done recklessly.

Constituents have provided evidence of street curbs having large chunks removed by the machinery and they have still not been fixed and their calls are not being responded to.

Dozens of constituents have interfaced with our office and reported that the contractor was rude and unconcerned with damage and would not follow up with them.

When the ADA ramps in the parkway were being done, the contractor, YBS ripped out vegetation, landscaping, irrigation systems, and lighting systems without any advanced notice to homeowners, and folks came home to find their parkway all ripped up.

The pavement was done very sloppily.

They installed asphalt over concrete gutters, which messes up the curb and the gutter for our stormwater drainage systems.

And in one case, SRM contracting knew that they received a bad batch of asphalt, and we have that communication between them and city staff, but they paved the street with it anyway, and then they had to go back and uh cut out that badass fault and then patch it.

And the whole point of resurfacing our streets is not to have patches.

Here we have to create it a weak spot that will be vulnerable to rain damage uh in the future and additional potholes.

So overall, I'm just really extremely disappointed in some of this contracting work, and I hope that the city would hold hold them accountable.

We can't expect to have the public stress if we are not requiring quality work of our contractors, and I look forward to working with the mayor and the administration to improve quality management going forward.

Thank you.

Thank you, and I appreciate those comments.

Uh would anybody from staff or the mayor's office like to address any of those comments at this time?

Mr.

Nagoborn, good to see you.

Good morning.

Good morning, James Megart, Director of Public Works and City Engineer.

Um I'll reach out to your office to get the exact addresses and locations and that some of this may be uh not only learning lessons in that, but some hopefully might be still under warranty.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

Nagelboard.

Appreciate that.

Um any other comments at this time?

Seeing none.

Alanter?

Um Thank you, Councilmember Ward.

Just want to let you know that we will work closely with staff and also with your office because not only paving all those miles of streets, but just like you said, making sure that we have quality work is critically important to all of us, so we will follow up.

And thank you for that.

I I just have one comment myself on a kind of a related topic, not in what what uh Vice Chair Ward just mentioned with those specific projects, but kind of on our related topic.