Huntington Beach City Council holds strategic planning workshop

The Huntington Beach City Council held a strategic planning and goal setting workshop Tuesday at the Huntington Beach Central Library.

Five of the seven council members were in the building, including Mayor Kim Carr, Barbara Delgleize, Mike Posey, Dan Kalmick and Natalie Moser. Councilman Erik Peterson had an excused absence from the meeting, while Mayor Pro Tem Tito Ortiz participated via Zoom from his car in the library parking lot.

Ortiz, who has been candid in his refusal to wear a mask during the coronavirus pandemic, posted on his Instagram stories that Carr told him he couldn’t come into the meeting without one.

“Great way to start the New Year off,” Ortiz said facetiously in the video. “Embarrassing.”

Carr said Tuesday night that Huntington Beach City Manager Oliver Chi sent out two emails to members of the council indicating that masks were mandatory for the meeting because it was indoors.

Carr said she did ask Ortiz to wear a mask before entering the building Tuesday morning, but he refused and walked out.

“I was pleasantly surprised that he decided to Zoom in because I want him to participate,” Carr said.

“I want him to be engaged and involved in the community, but I also want him to do it safely ... We’re following all of the guidelines set by the CDC, by the state, by the county. I’m not asking him to do anything out of the ordinary or anything that’s above and beyond what elected officials all over the United States are adhering to.”

Ortiz and Peterson did not wear masks to the Dec. 21 City Council meeting and were admonished by Kalmick.

Tuesday’s six-hour meeting was run in association with Pat West LLC. West is a consultant who is the former city manager of Lakewood and Long Beach. He held the latter post for 12 years before retiring in 2019.

City Council members identified five areas that they’d like to focus on for 2021: community engagement, homelessness, economic development, infrastructure and COVID-19. Members had a brainstorming session about each topic.

Regarding community engagement, Kalmick said the key is to tell residents as many times as possible.

“Tell them again and again and again, on everything,” he said.

“It should be a one-button dashboard, right? You type in all your information once and boom, the mail gets printed, the emails go out, the text blasts go out, the phone calls start, the social media campaign goes out. This is five-years-ago technology ... we just need the policy direction to say let’s do this, and do it as much as we possibly can.

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“We don’t want social media from a third party carrying the message. I think we need to take back our control of our messaging and bring back that trust in the government, to a certain extent.”

Ortiz shared a personal story regarding homelessness, as he said he encountered a group of homeless people near the intersection of Beach Boulevard and Warner Avenue recently. The city opened its homeless Navigation Center on Dec. 7.

“I pulled my car over and I went up to them, and I said, ‘How can I help you guys get into the Navigation Center?’” Ortiz said. “The first automatic answer I got from one of the guys was, ‘That’s a concentration camp, we’re not going there because we’ve got to do mandatory this and that.’

“Well, that shows that’s a person who doesn’t want to get help. They’re not educated on what the Navigation Center truly is for, and that’s to help them ... I sat there and I talked to the guy for over 45 minutes, and, yeah, he wasn’t all the way there [but he and his friends] don’t want help. They’re happy not having bills to pay and not having to answer people, and I think that’s one of the roadblocks we’ll run into every single time.”

“The ones that don’t want help, how do we get them out or to a different city? I want to do it with compassion ... how can we show them the right way and show them that we’re here to help them. The reason why I ran [for City Council] is because I don’t want this city to turn into Santa Monica or San Francisco.”

Chi said the Navigation Center is working on getting the internet up and running, with computer workstations on the way through the efforts of the city’s Homeless Task Force. He added that the police department has been engaging in enforcement efforts.

“It’s not going to eliminate homelessness — there’s nothing illegal about being homeless — but we do have rules against camping and loitering in public spaces,” Chi said.

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