Costa Mesa Moves To Outsource Half of Its Services

The city of Costa Mesa, CA, home to South Coast Plaza and the Trinity Broadcasting Network, is in big financial trouble and is moving to outsource half of its city services.

The Costa Mesa City Council is considering outsourcing roughly half of the city's government functions.

All city employees were notified Friday afternoon that the City Council had added an item to the agenda for its meeting Tuesday: layoff notices for employees providing 18 city services as a proposed budget-cutting measure. Those services include maintenance, information technology, communications, payroll, firefighting, jail administration, animal control, building inspection, and printing.

Aside from the fire department, the two city departments that would be hit hardest are the Public Services Department, which handles maintenance and engineering, and the Administrative Services Department, which would be gutted.

The Council voted to proceed with the layoffs of half their employees last night.

Outsourcing services such as the ones listed above is a great and fiscally sound idea.  Let me show you a map of Orange County (a bigger version can be found here):

Orange County is a densely populated 948 square mile area with more than 3,000,000 residents and 34 incorporate cities plus some remaining county islands. Driving through Orange County it's almost impossible to tell when you travel from one city to the next - there's no discernible boundary or space between them. If it wasn't for the city limit signs, you'd never know when you crossed city boundaries. Consolidating services among these cities makes absolute sense, and has already been done to some degree, especially in the fire and law enforcement services.

In the early '70's when I was a teen listening to fire dispatches on my scanner, the cities of Westminster (where I lived), Buena Park, San Clemente and Seal Beach all had their own fire departments. Today those cities are all served by the Orange County Fire Authority. Consolidating services with the county allowed those cities to reduce their costs, and the overall costs to the taxpayers of the county, by eliminating some of the redundant overhead and facilities costs.

San Clemente had its own police department, but now every city south of Irvine uses the Orange County Sheriff for their law enforcement services, as well as does a number of other areas in the county.

And there's no downside for the cities to move to county services. Thanks to the mutual aid agreements in Orange County, city boundaries are pretty much erased and the nearest unit to a particular call is dispatched, regardless of what city the call takes place in. I often hear units from two or sometimes three jurisdictions rolling on the same call.

Sometimes I think cities retain their own police and fire departments more out of pride than anything else. The city leaders like to see those cars and trucks with their city's name and emblem on them, but that pride comes with a big cost, especially with so many cities packed into such a small area. In Central and North Orange County you have the cities of Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley, Garden Grove, Orange, Santa Ana, Anaheim and Fullerton, each with their own police and fire departments. Think of the duplication of costs that are involved there.

Here in Mission Viejo we contract with Orange County Fire and the Orange County Sheriffs for our emergency services, and the units that serve our area have our city name on the door.  Works for me.

It may be some years down the road, but eventually all of these cities will have to make the same tough decisions that Costa Mesa is making now and will have to consolidate at least some of their services with the County or other agencies. It makes perfect sense to do so and the sooner they make that move, the better it will be for the taxpayers.