By Grace Leung, Newport Beach City Manager
The next City Council meeting is Tuesday, May 23. Items of interest are highlighted below. The entire agenda and reports can be viewed here: https://www.newportbeachca.gov/Home/Components/Calendar/Event/71668/72.
A special joint meeting of the City Council and Finance Committee will begin at 4 p.m.:
- The Council and Finance Committee will review the City’s proposed Fiscal Year 2023-24 operating budget, including revenue assumptions, expenditure requirements, and program enhancement recommendations.
A study session will begin at 4 p.m. Agenda items include:
- Review of the proposed Fiscal Year 2023-24 Capital Improvement Program (CIP) budget. Staff will present the proposed $74 million budget along with planned public improvements, special projects, ongoing maintenance programs, and more. CIP projects include streets, alleys and highways, storm drains and water quality, harbor, piers and beaches, parks and facilities, water and wastewater systems, transportation safety, traffic signal improvements, and planning programs and studies.
The regular meeting will begin at 5:30 p.m. Agenda items include:
- Conversion of the Police Department’s Boardwalk Ambassador program to the “Boardwalk and Quality of Life Enforcement Program.” The conversion would use existing funding, $200,000 a year, to deploy police officers and parking control officers on overtime to work directed enforcement assignments dealing with boardwalk safety issues and quality-of-life issues. The program would replace the Boardwalk Ambassador program, launched in 2021, which utilized contractors to address bicycle speeding and other unsafe behaviors on the Oceanfront Boardwalk.
- The Council will consider a Harbor Commission recommendation for a pilot program that would reconfigure Newport Harbor mooring field “C” to improve navigational safety and optimize space. The Harbor Commission’s recommendation, which followed extensive study and public input opportunities, would allow for a more efficient arrangement of the offshore moorings by opening waterways between rows within the mooring fields and on the boundary edges, and create a process by which requests for mooring length extensions can be effectively accomplished without compromising the efficient arrangement of moorings within a field.
- An ordinance requiring owners of short-term lodging properties to reinvest and improve their units, to help ensure that visitors to Newport Beach enjoy a high-level guest experience and that residential neighborhoods are not burdened by unkept short-term lodging units. The proposed ordinance, if approved, would require owners of short-term lodging units to reinvest, at least once every three years, a minimum of 10% of the rent collected from a lodging unit over the preceding three years back into the unit for improvements including structural and/or façade maintenance and repairs, finishes and fixtures, landscape maintenance, or other repairs to the exterior or interior. Newly constructed lodging units would be exempt from the requirement for the first five years following receipt of a certificate of occupancy from the City.
City Council Meeting Information
The Newport Beach City Council meets on the second and fourth Tuesdays of most months (the exceptions are August and December). Typically, there is a Study Session that starts at 4 p.m. Study sessions are times for the Council to take a deeper look at a specific issue, or hear a presentation, that might eventually lead to a specific and more formal action. A closed session often follows the Study Session. Closed sessions are typically to address legal, personnel, and other matters where additional confidentiality is important.
The Regular (evening) Session typically starts at 6 p.m., and often has a specific listing of different items ready for formal votes. Items on the “Consent Calendar” are heard all at once, unless a Council member has removed (aka “pulled”) an item from the Consent Calendar for specific discussion and separate vote. If an item on the agenda is recommended to be “continued”, it means that the item won’t be heard nor voted on that evening, but will be pushed forward to another noticed meeting.
Public Comment is welcomed at both the Study Session and the Regular Session. The public can comment on any item on the agenda. If you want to comment on a Consent Calendar item that was not pulled from the Consent Calendar by a Council Member, you will want to do so at the time listed on the agenda – right before the Council votes on the entire Consent Calendar (it’s Roman Numeral XIII on the posted agenda). If an item is pulled, the Mayor will offer that members of the public can comment as that specific item is heard separately.
Additionally, there is a specific section of Public Comment for items not on the agenda, but on a subject of some relationship to the city government. If you cannot attend a meeting and/or want to communicate with the City Council directly, this e-mail gets to all of them: [email protected]. The City Manager also gets a copy of the email, because in almost all cases it’s something that the City Manager follows-up on.
The Council meets in the Council Chambers at 100 Civic Center Dr., off of Avocado between San Miguel and East Coast Highway. There is plenty of parking in the parking structure. You are always welcome to attend in person, but you can also watch on TV, Spectrum channel 30 and Cox channel 852 or stream it on your computer.
This Insider’s Guide is not an attempt to summarize every item on the Agenda – just the ones that seem of specific interest to the City Manager. You are encouraged to read the full agenda if you wish.
