Here’s a summary of what’s on the City Council agenda for this coming Tuesday, July 21, 2026.  In this agenda summary, I cover what I think are the more noteworthy items that will appear on the Council agendas.  If you want to see the entire agenda, click here.   A couple of folks have noted that the new agenda portal is confusing to use – it gets easier if you remember that the three dots are your friends.

If you use the dots to navigate, you can choose PDF downloads or HTML, and go from there. 

 My agenda summary doesn’t include all of the items up for consideration – just ones that I think should have additional community awareness.  Please share this with others if you represent a neighborhood association (thanks!). 

 Our meetings generally start at 5:00 p.m. on the 2^nd and 4^th Tuesdays of the month (except for July and August) at Laguna Beach City Hall, 505 Forest Avenue – the meeting is in the Council Chambers adjacent to Fire Station #1.  Our next meeting is on another first Tuesday – it’s August 4^th, not August 11^th. 

 A couple of Community Notes:

• We have an additional special Council meeting a week from this one (July 28 – starting at 3:00 p.m.), which will involve three DRB appeals.  That agenda and those staff reports are available, too. Council has started doing “appeals days” about once a quarter, so as to not land the appeals late in the evening on regular Council nights.  We do so with the consent of the appellants and applicants.  Remember too that you can watch them on Zoom now.
• We did a couple of Promenade updates on social media over the past few days – try to find those and hopefully it addresses some questions we’ve gotten about the remaining pacing of the job.  In a nutshell, a few items are delayed because of delivery issues, and the remaining brickwork is a long slog given how sensitive the work is, and how some of it needs to be done at night.  Oh, and I now have a visceral dislike of spilled ice cream.
• We had a great first meeting of the Hospital Task Force this week.  These meetings are open to the public, with the next one being Thursday, August 20, 2026 at the Susi Q/Community Center (starting at 4:30 p.m.).  Please consider joining us next time.

 We have a study session this week – starting at 3:00 p.m.  This time, it’s a Joint Meeting of the City Council and the Heritage Committee.  The major part of the discussion will be the report of a consultant, ASM Affiliates, who was tasked with making a series of recommendations about historic property issues.  They looked at how we use the Mills Act (which allows for property tax reductions provided that the savings are invested in preserving the historic nature of the home), as well as how the City government approaches historic properties. 

 The regular session starts at 5:00 p.m.

I’ll highlight these items:

• We respond formally to two Orange County Grand Jury reports that concluded the GJ’s 2025-26 calendar.  It’s typical that the Grand Jury will offer its thoughts on key civic or policy matters, and then ask every city with some related interest in the matter to comment back as to whether we agree or disagree with the findings and recommendations.  This term, the GJ looked at State Housing Laws and Wildfire Preparation (among other things) – and asked us to respond with our comments.  The reports as well as our responses are included in the agenda item.  Ann C noted that our housing response had an HTML transfer problem and looks goofy, so as I write this summary, assume it will be a lot more readable by Monday morning.  
• Boring but important: Much of the downtown will get new paving and sidewalk repair starting after summer.  This is not (repeat, not) the Ocean Avenue – Beach Street improvement plan that has engendered a lot of discussion.  This one is basic maintenance. 
• Lifeguard Towers.  I’ve seen some discussion via email and online about the City’s long-term plan to replace many of the portable red towers with caisson-based poly lifeguard towers that are more permanent and more protected from the elements.  Eventually, the plan is to have 39 of these – but not all at once.  It should happen over multiple fiscal years.  Planning Commission this week had “concept review” of how these might be placed and where – concept review is very early in the process, where we ask the Commission and community for their input.  The item on the Council agenda for Tuesday is only to hire the engineering firm to start work on the specific placements, which involves geology, wave and tidal impacts, and community use needs (like the Vic Beach volleyball court).  There is a big reason to do this:  skin cancer.  Included in that is the consequence to the City for multiple skin cancer claims where better infrastructure was available.  Our Marine Safety team is critically important to all of us – to me, providing them with the right protective equipment is essential.   
• Congrats to the Police Department for securing about $475,000 in competitive grant funding associated with the State’s cannabis taxation fund. No, we don’t allow the sale of commercial cannabis in town, but we are eligible to apply for grants like this, which go towards DUI checkpoints, education, prevention, and training.      
• Dig in with me on this next one, please.  It’s a discussion item about the Downtown Specific Plan, Phase II.   This involves a Programmatic EIR that envisions the environmental impact of 2^nd or 3^rd story residential in the Downtown Specific Plan area, which includes downtown plus well into the Canyon to the Boys and Girls Club.  Many in the community looked at the amount of units being studied in the EIR and envisioned a dramatic change to the downtown – I get that, but that was no one’s intent (to be a place with channelized stucco along the lines of parts of Dana Point).  Our “6^th Cycle” Housing Element requires us to site a significant amount of units, including in the downtown – and it required us to start studying that to keep a compliant housing element (for you housing readers, check out this piece about Costa Mesa in the OC Register).  Here’s what’s happened since the EIR got started – among other things, State law changed.  It allows some housing without CEQA (which is the law that causes EIRs to be needed).  Staff is recommending that instead of finishing the EIR, we roll the larger discussion of housing in the downtown into a discussion about siting for our next Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) across the community, as a part of updating our Housing Element for its 7^th Cycle (which begins very soon!).  This allows the community to talk about this more, for the Council to provide some additional guiderails, and to consider other housing sites that may not have been identified in the 6^th Cycle Housing Element (kudos to anyone who followed me this far – really).
• We have a follow up presentation about a proposed contract with a new Mobile Parking App vendor, IPS.  This is important in part because parking technology is changing so fast, and vendors like IPS are on the cutting edge of how cities effectively manage their parking assets.  Part of the updated contract includes a more regular strategizing with IPS and the City to improve parking management based on thorough data and analysis.
• The Design Review Efficiency ordinances are back for final review and adoption.  I’ve written about these a bit before, and won’t go into it again unless you yell at me. 
• There is a public hearing that allows us to tell the County of Orange to bill us all for our sewer fees.  Which have not gone up – but fair warning, that’s probably coming when a new Master Plan is complete and a benchmarking study is in and presented to the Council (coming in a handful of weeks). 
• There is public hearing involving a lot line merger to accomplish the planned Pacific Edge renovation, but the recommended action asks for the hearing to be tabled.  A few issues need to be resolved before we’re ready to consider that lot merger (all five parcels are within the Pacific Edge footprint).

 As always, thanks for reading – stay hydrated through our muggy end-of-July, too.  Remember the 7-28 appeals meeting if that’s something you follow – 399 Pearl, 950 Baja, and 332 Locust.

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