Venezia: Mayor pro tem’s team spirit questioned

This post has been corrected, as noted below.

Is Mayor Pro Tem Diane Dixon neutering Team Newport’s power?

Newport resident Mike Glenn, who considered running against Dixon but decided against it, thinks so, as he stated in a message to me.

For the record: An earlier version of this post called Michael Glenn an opponent who ran for City Council against Mayor Pro Tem Diane Dixon. In fact, he considered running for council but did not run in the race.

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And he’s not the only one who questioned Dixon’s team spirit after she broke ranks with Councilmen Scott Peotter, Marshall Duffield and Kevin Muldoon — the three other members of the Team Newport political slate that ran in November — and voted in favor of approving the city’s proposed budget.

I prefer my politicians be independent thinkers with a bit of chutzpah rather than members of a voting bloc.

So while some criticized Dixon, I applaud her emerging autonomy.

But some hardcore Team Newport fans didn’t appreciate Dixon’s budget vote, as was evident by online chatter below her May 29 Daily Pilot that explained the way she voted.

I called Dixon to ask about some of this.

Regarding Glenn she said, “Where people want to make controversy and stir things up you have to look at their agenda. Check my record in three and a half years, and I will stand by it.”

As far as a break in Team Newport, Dixon tells me she just has a “different style,” and “we are all individuals, and we are all going to get to the same place.”

“Team Newport was an election thing,” she said. “We are 99% on the big picture items and (on) some of the small items we sometimes do not agree.”

She doesn’t feel she’s ventured far from the group’s agenda, pointing out that Muldoon and Duffield supported her effort to hire additional police for the peninsula while Peotter didn’t.

The team didn’t support her first efforts to take a deeper look into the overspending on the Civic Center project, but now it does, and she welcomes the support.

“We have to learn how to manage cost-effective projects and prevent problems like scope-creep and project confusion,” she said.

Dixon feels taking a closer look at the costs and project management will help the city do a better job moving forward with other planned construction projects.

“Cost escalation is lack of project management, oversight and budget accountability,” she said.

She wants to ask “different questions,” readily admitting she is not a “construction management person,” but doesn’t think there’s a big learning curve to becoming more efficient.”

That statement showed me she has no idea how deep she will need to dig.

If Dixon really wants to understand what happened here, she needs to delve into the past to get a complete picture of the city’s history of dysfunctional project management.

Poor oversight, and overspending didn’t start with the City Hall Civic Center project, rather it culminated with it.

I witnessed this dysfunction during my days serving on the Santa Ana Heights Redevelopment Agency Project Advisory Committee. Cost overruns, scope-creep and mismanagement ran rampant with RDA projects turned over to the city after the area was annexed from the county in 2003.

When the Orange County Board of Supervisors approved $11 million on a plan to refurbish the YMCA into a community center, city staff and council took the bottom line to $26 million with their additions and changes. The county rescinded the funding, and the community lost out.

With an RDA budget of $6 million for the Santa Ana Heights fire station, under the city’s supervision, end costs skyrocketed to $11.5 million.

By far the biggest mismanaged building project in Santa Ana Heights was the undergrounding and trail refurbishing along Cypress Street and Mesa Drive. First discussed in the early 1990’s with a projected budgeted of $2 million, the project was completed at an estimated $10.5 million in 2014.

Though our committee complained about inefficiencies to the county and city, its words fell on deaf ears. The city had its explanations, and the county accepted them.

So will Dixon’s fishing exhibition turn up anything?

I predict looking into the contracted companies won’t reveal much.

What did or didn’t council know during this time frame?

And what about city staff who dealt with day-to-day activities and were the boots on the ground here?

With so much time passing explanations are probably in place. Pulling the curtain back won’t be easy, nor will it be easy to change the culture within City Hall when it comes to building projects.

BARBARA VENEZIA lives in Newport Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].