City agrees to hire outside planning firm

<p>After laying off or granting early retirement to most of its planning staff, City Hall will bring on a Mountain View firm with experience handling other communities’ day-to-day planning needs as well as long-range growth policies.</p><!-- Nothing to do. The paragraph has already been output --><p>The City Council on Monday selected Metropolitan Planning Group for a one-year agreement, a choice City Manager John Brown recommended from a dozen firms that indicated interest in working for Petaluma.</p><p>“They do have extensive experience here in the Bay Area, working with communities much like our own with issues much like our own,” Brown said.</p><p>The firm, known as M-Group, will hire the handful of remaining city planners and building staff working part-time since the community development department was dismantled in a cost-cutting move this spring.</p><p>Combined with a prior round of cuts last fall, 17 department employees were either let go or accepted early retirement offers as the city struggled to pay salaries with little development activity occurring.</p><p>As a result, the department’s “counter hours” for the public were eliminated, requiring appointments to be made with planning staff.</p><p>M-Group will change that, opening the current planning offices for public consultation eight hours a day, Mondays through Thursdays — the same hours that the rest of City Hall is open.</p><p>“We’re open four days a week again,” Brown said.</p><p>The one-year agreement can be renewed for up to three additional years. The council has expressed hope that the city can hire an in-house planning staff when the economy recovers and development activity increases.</p><p>By hiring existing planning staff, the new firm will be able to retain historical knowledge of projects and policies, a benefit both to M-Group and project applicants currently in the pipeline, Brown noted.</p><p>Under the agreement, planning services will happen on what’s called a “cost-recovery” basis, meaning a self-supporting operation whose employees are paid from development application fees.</p><p>But Brown cautioned that there are no guarantees that development will increase to the point that planning services are 100 percent self-supporting. The M-Group has indicated that about $300,000 in development revenue is needed for “full cost recovery,” he said in his report to the council.</p><p>Last year, the city earned about $152,000 in development-processing fees, though more development applications have come in recently, he noted.</p><p>The city has budgeted $40,000 in general fund money to bridge the gap, and there is a balance of $590,000 in the cost-recovery account that can be drawn upon as the projects for which those fees were paid move forward, the city said.</p><p>Brown said M-Group offers the “right customer service orientation” to benefit both applicants and the public.</p><p>“I think this gives us the opportunity to wipe the slate clean with respect to the community’s perception of how this department has been operating,” he told the council. “It represents a huge improvement over where we are now.”</p><p>(Contact Corey Young at corey.young@arguscourier.com)</p>