Majority of funds allocated for improvement go to city fees

By Margie M. Palmer | Reportero SDUN

City fees have eaten up three quarters of the budget for the modest Lewis Street Pocket Park project.

Mission Hills Town Council Board of Trustees president Mark Felhman said he’s still trying to understand how, after the City of San Diego allocated $450,000 in development impact fees toward the Lewis Street Pocket Park project, city fees, including consulting, architectural services and permitting have left just over $100,000 to be used for park improvements.

Initiated by the community in 2003, the project was to provide for the design and construction of a .33-acre mini park at the northwest corner of West Lewis and Falcon streets that would be a model for future canyon-rim pocket parks. City Council had allocated the $450,000 budget in the form of Development Impact Fees (DIF). Felhman said, the developers of One Mission and Mission Hills Commons apartments paid those fees to the city prior to the buildings’ construction and that they were to be used toward neighborhood improvement and beautification, as cited in the Uptown Community Plan and Public Facilities Financing Plan. Both plans specifically call for the development of mini parks.

“The bulk of the cost of the park is engineering, consulting, architectural services and permit fees, with the balance going toward construction. This is really ass backward as far as I’m concerned,” Felhman said.

Proposed community improvements included the addition of benches, an Americans with Disabilities Act compliant pedestrian path, upgrades to existing trails, public art, and native plants landscaping, as well as an educational kiosk featuring information on the area’s birds. Felhman said he felt the design proposal was minimal.

“I just don’t understand how it is we had all this money to spend, yet the city is going to get most of it,” he said.

One Mission Hills resident who has been involved with the park project since its inception, who spoke with Noticias de la zona residencial de San Diego on the condition of anonymity, said she felt a large part of the problem came from city consultants’ desire to modify the original plan.

“They kept taking what had started as a very basic concept and wanted to make it completely different than what we’d envisioned, and we had to keep telling them to simplify it back to the original vision,” she said.

City additions to the plan, she noted, included large tree planters and poured concrete. “We were told that the final cost for the project would be in excess of $600,000, and we just didn’t understand that,” she said. “We didn’t want tons of concrete and big tree planters. We just wanted a simple passive park next to our canyon where people could hang out and relax.”

In a Sept. 17, 2007, email obtained by Noticias de la zona residencial de San Diego, the city’s project contact, Sheila Bose, wrote that a number of additional costs unanticipated during the planning phase would need to be covered. Such costs include $7,000 for professional geotechnical services and $76,000 for geotechnical recommendations during construction; $15,000 in additional construction costs for inclusion of donated art pieces; $5,000 for resurveying the project site after a storm drain break, and $54,000 in Development Services Department permitting fees.

“Lessening the scope to reduce costs to fit into the total project budget is not a practical option,” she wrote, “as above costs will remain the same in their entirety and not be reduced proportionately. This will result in a project with a very small amount of constructed amenities to be enjoyed by the park users.”

The University Heights Recreation Council (UHRC) disagreed with the city’s proposed changes.

“[This] project has been drastically changed in its design,” wrote UHRC chair Marcia Boruta in an April 2009 letter to the DSD. “The URHC [requests] the total budget be capped at the original DIF allocation of $450,000.”

Felhman said that construction of the park will begin in September. However, although he added he’s excited to see the project in the final phases of fruition, he’s disappointed that due to city processes and fees the final construction budget is barely more than $100,000. He’s also disappointed that the city vetoed the installation of donated artwork.

“Originally we were supposed to have these beautiful sculptures, but the city didn’t like that idea,” he said. “And right now what we’re trying to do is find out why the city is charging so much for in-house engineering and construction engineering fees.”

District 2 City Councilmember Kevin Faulconer, whose district includes Mission Hills, said he’s requested accounting numbers from the city to ensure the numbers match. Faulconer said he expects to receive that information by mid August.

“I think this should be questioned,” Faulconer said. “The community had been given this money and we need to have an accounting of what all of this money was spent on, where it has been appropriated and to learn if anything should be credited back to us. Performance at the city level needs to be held accountable and the very issue of how long projects take and then city staff billing toward it needs to be looked at.”