First the recent $17.5 million Palmer Canyon fire settlement, now a very costly goof with Claremont's Village West project. He's over two years gone, but as our readers have pointed out, Glenn Southard is the gift that keeps on giving.
A Will Bigham article in the Daily Bulletin today indicated that back in 2002, when Village West was just beginning to take shape, then-City Manager Southard and his staff decided it'd be a good idea to put in the utility infrastructure ahead of time. Southard's reasoning was that it would attract businesses to the project by having all the sewer, electrical, communication, water and gas connections in place ahead of time.
Southard's staff told the developer, The Tolkin Group, that when the businesses eventually went in, several years later, it wouldn't cost much to adjust the utility connections to whatever configuration the buildings actually took.
But it turns out that the price of adjusting the utility connections to fit the actual project is going to be $675,000--a bill the city is having to foot. Unfortunately, this is something we've seen emerge time and again from the Southard management style. It's akin to the old Soviet-style five-year plan. Decide what the shape of the future is going to be, price in all your false assumptions, devote manpower and resources to achieve it, and then discover that when it arrives the reality is different from what you'd assumed. Next step: come up with another misguided five-year plan to adjust for the mistakes you made before. And so on.
The city staff report on the problem states:
As construction of the project has progressed, the developer has incurred approximately $1.5 million in additional site and utility costs that were not in its construction budget, as a result of having to relocate utilities and reconstruct portions of the public streetscapes.
Staff has negotiated that $1.5 million down to the $675,000 the city will now have to pay to Tolkin Group to compensate them for their additional costs. (Compensate is a key word that comes up time and again with the landmines Southard left behind.)
Sadly, this is the same sort of planning that Councilmembers Ellen Taylor, Linda Elderkin, Sam Pedroza, and their Claremont 400 supporters want to return to. This is the "vision" they speak of. As we've said before, sometimes "vision" is blind.
Mayor Peter Yao, who can always be counted on to say something appropriately ironic, was quoted in the Bulletin article: "'I hope future councils don't have to clean up messes that we create,' Yao said."
We couldn't agree more.
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