New public works head has plenty on plate

Newly hired Public Works Director Glen Kau stands in his office at City Hall, with a map of Hermosa Beach in the background. Photo

 

Public works departments tend to invert the expectations and desires residents typically have for other city functions. While most branches face concerns about reeling in costs, the primary issue for public works is often spending what has already been appropriated. This has proven true in Hermosa Beach, where residents and some on the City Council have recently grown agitated about a lack of visible progress on public works projects, particularly following the imposition of a sewer fee in the previous fiscal year.

Glen Kau, the city’s recently hired Public Works Director, has heard complaints like this before.

Kau comes to Hermosa after heading up the Public Works Department in Compton. He arrived there shortly after the city had passed a sewer bond, but also after a period of time in which turnover at City Hall meant that progress on bond projects had stalled. Kau managed to spend down some $10 million in bond proceeds and got more than 12 miles of sewer improvements built.

“Often,” he said with a smile, “without tearing up the street.”

Kau’s hiring was announced earlier this month. He replaces Andrew Brozyna, who left over the summer for a job in Northern California. Kau arrives in Hermosa with the city poised for action: at his first City Council meeting, the council approved long-awaited master plans on storm drains and sewers, as well as a street paving program.

But while there is real pressure to get things done, he also faces high expectations to get things right. Dense plans and detailed purchase orders may go unnoticed by most residents, but once a project actually begins, Public Works is arguably the city’s most visible department. Success in Kau’s mind means informing people of potential inconveniences ahead of time, making sure residents understand project benefits, and then getting out of their way as soon as possible.

“You don’t want to impact people too much. But I like to say to people, ‘If you allow me to come in with this project, we’ll annoy you for a little while, then you won’t see us again for a decade,’” Kau said.

The Redondo Beach resident has spent decades at a variety of cities and public agencies throughout Southern California. His last posting, in Compton, presented a different set of challenges.

“He came on in a very turbulent period, and he really moved mountains,” said Dr. Kofi Sefa-Boakye, head of the Successor Agency of the City of Compton.

Compton’s Successor Agency is the legacy of the city’s Redevelopment Agency. Redevelopment agencies, which were dissolved in the 2011 state budget following financial crisis-induced shortfalls, used property tax revenues to advance development, particularly in economically disadvantaged areas. When Kau arrived in Compton, the Successor Agency had acquired a “sizeable amount of property,” Sefa-Boakye said, that it hoped could anchor improvements. But many of the parcels needed new water and utilities connections, and the surrounding streets had to be assessed for induced-traffic impact. Kau, Sefa-Boakye said, was the perfect man for the job.

“We really built on his expertise. For public works, you need an engineer who really understands fiscal development,” he said.

Kau gave a similar description of the dual demands placed on a public works director. The position, he said, requires both an understanding of the hard sciences involved in construction and design, as well as the social art of navigating the funding landscape for municipal projects.

Hermosa, a far more affluent city than Compton, will have a different set of funding opportunities and constraints. Hermosa is not eligible for many of the state and federal grants directed at economically disadvantaged cities, but Kau said opportunities remain. He pointed to a grant program, administered by the South Bay Cities Council of Governments, that provides a 10 percent refund in paving programs for using asphalt made from recycled tires. The pavement actually tends to stay darker longer than alternatives from non-recycled sources, Kau said, and he hopes the city will consider participating for its upcoming street paving program.

Even more important to fiscal balance is project planning, Kau said. Something as simple as “coring” a street — removing a cylindrical sample of road, a foot or so deep, in order to get a cross section of what is actually beneath — can result in significant savings. He brought up a hypothetical in which a city assumes that there is 1.5 inches of pavement on a road, when there is in fact only 1 inch separating the surface from concrete beneath.

“If you see that white smoke coming up off the road, you’re hitting your head, thinking, ‘Oh, no.’ That’s a change order, and that’s expensive,” Kau said.

The challenge for Kau is to minimize things like change orders while getting projects going as soon as possible. He plans to spend the next two months immersing himself in the Capital Improvement Program (CIP) and the funding sources, as well as talking to staff in the field. He’ll set priorities for projects finding the overlap between what’s on paper and information on the ground.

Kau doesn’t have a definite start date for pending projects identified in the city’s CIP, but he said plans to put “a pretty good dent in,” the CIP this fiscal year, with many expected to begin construction in that time.

Once the projects are prioritized, Kau plans to keep himself accountable by putting a chart of projects up on the city’s website, with the current fiscal year, as well as the next two, demonstrating when the city expects to begin spending money — and, ideally, when residents can expect construction.

“Information is key. It is called the public sector, after all,” Kau said.

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