City Manager Letter in response to ENU public participation recommendations

Our thanks to City Manager Clay Phillips for responding to the ENU letter of  recommendations for improving public participation in Escondido.  You can see his letter here City Manager Letter to ENU August 11.
It is good news to hear that there will be a public meeting during the comment period for Oak Creek! We hope to learn the date soon and request that there will be a formal structure including a presentation that is provided to the attendees together so that everyone has the same information.  We also request that there be an opportunity to put oral comments on the record verbally as most hearings provide. We note that a Scoping meeting was held for Oak Creek, but our point was that it was only after a regulatory agency requested it and not as a matter of policy or in response to public requests.
We also shared in our letter that the RSS feed that the city has on the website has proven elusive for most (all?) of us to use.   We hope the City will consider an automatic email notice for people who request is such as is done by the city of Chula Vista with great success.
We also appreciate that, while the city may do more than other jurisdictions related annexation (e.g a pre-vote on annexation), in our view, if the notice to the public is insufficient the Council does not have the adequate input to make the decision regarding to whether or not the effort should go forward.  The pre-vote for Oak Creek for example, did not provided adequate notice to impacted communities so the Council did not the benefit of the full public perspective .  We hope the city and County will work together for a better solution in the future that is not so heavily reliant on a public outreach strategy directed by developers.  Minimally, all 'sphere-of-influence' residents impacted should be notified and local public areas (like Felicita Park) should be posted of any contemplated annexations.
We appreciate the comments in the letter and we hope to have a meeting with the city to discuss our recommendations in full.  Here is our original letter. ENU letter to City on Public Participation