Editor's note: This story is part of an ongoing series that tracks the city's expenditures appearing on upcoming Santa Monica City Council consent agendas. Consent agenda items are routinely passed by the City Council with little or no discussion from elected officials or the public. However, many of the items have been part of public discussion in the past.
CITY HALL — City Council will consider spending $6,202,100 on a three-item consent agenda. Almost all of the cash would be set aside for parking operations.
City Hall is recommending that council add another year and $5.9 million dollars to a 5-year $30 million contract with Central Parking Systems for the operation of their parking garages around the city.
City Hall controls 14,283 parking spaces spread across 12 garages and 30 lots. Its contract with Central Parking expires at the end of the month and it was expected that they'd transition to a new parking operator right around now. But City Hall's parking and traffic manager left the job in early September and the parking administrator left a week later. This disrupted the plans and so city officials say council should approve month-to-month payments of $490,000 to Central Parking for the next year.
The transition to a new operator should happen around Oct. 1 of next year, city officials say.
Easy meters
Council will consider testing out newfangled water meters. A $220,000 payment to Badge Meter, Inc. would lead to the replacement of 1,700 of City Hall's 17,000 water meters with Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI).
AMI uses radio-based technology to collect data more frequently and without the need for manual readings.
"AMI would aid in water conservation and improve customer service by alerting staff and customers to irregular fluctuations in water usage immediately and allow current staff assigned to meter reading to perform more efficient maintenance of the existing infrastructure and respond to AMI-generated water leak alerts with timelier repairs," city officials said in a report.
This new system would be tested through a one-year pilot program.
If it works, City Hall will recommend replacing all of the meters in phases. Eventually, City Hall could read meters monthly, instead of bi-monthly, aligning water bills with electric and gas.
If it doesn't work, the City Hall will revert the meters back to manual.
New CAP
Council will consider spending $102,100 on the development of a Cost Allocation Plan (CAP), which is meant to "recover indirect costs from enterprise funds, special revenue funds and other funds, as well as to establish user fees, permits and applications, billing rates, hourly rates, and costs of special services."
MGT of America, Inc. is set to get the contract.
dave@www.smdp.com
