August 3, 2010

Subject: RPV Update

Dear RPV Residents,

The RPV city council has a number of issues coming forward over the next several months. The most important is that we will be considering placing a proposed city charter on the ballot for voters to consider. You can see the staff report and the proposed language at:

Staff Report re City Charter

The proposed language is less than 2 pages long. It is a simple charter that is designed to provide the city with more local control. Being a charter city will allow the city to avoid prevailing wage requirements and thus likely save as much as $1 million per year on public works projects. The charter may also better protect the city's hotel tax revenue generated by Terranea from raids by state government. A city charter would also allow the city to set higher signature requirements for initiatives like the Marymount initiative. The council unanimously supports the charter and will be deciding (perhaps as soon as tomorrow August 2nd) which election to schedule it for next year. The charter has been carefully crafted to keep state law restrictions on salaries in place. RPV will never be another Bell.

Although there is no city council election this fall, your state election ballot will have an important local issue on it. Marymount College has qualified an initiative for the ballot that would allow the college to build dormitories in a residential neighborhood. The college abandoned its application for dormitories before it was decided by the planning commission or heard by the council. The college did get entitlements for all of the other improvements it applied for. But by pressing ahead with the initiative, the college could escape city oversight, gain approval of dormitories and avoid city regulation through conditions of approval. Although the college is a valuable part of the city, I do not favor planning by initiative nor do I think dormitories would be good for the neighborhood. The college has existing housing not far away that only needs to be rehabilitated and its existing site in RPV is more appropriately reserved for educational and athletic facilities. You can get more information on reasons to oppose the initiative on my webpage at:

Marymount Initiative

I will try to add a link to discussions on the other side of the initative to my webpage to give you more information. I will cover other issues in an subsequent update.

Mayor Pro Tem Tom Long, Rancho Palos Verdes
tomlong@paloverdes.com