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Costa Mesa council considers nearly $25M union contract today

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A nearly $25 million employment contract with Costa Mesa’s municipal employee union will go for City Council review Tuesday.

The roughly 200-member Costa Mesa City Employees Assn. ratified the contract last month, but the deal still faces two public hearings, the first of which is next week, before final adoption by the council later this year.

The contract would run through June 2016 and is estimated to save some $950,000 a year compared with CMCEA’s prior labor agreement, which expired in March 2013.

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The contract preserves some benefits for existing employees but proposes steep cuts for new hires, among them: 40 hours of paid vacation in the first year instead of 92 and a 10% salary reduction for new hires.

The agreement also stipulates that employees contribute more to their pension plan. It also permits the future outsourcing of street sweeping services, with no layoffs of existing city employees.

The contract approval process is falling under the guidelines of COIN, or Civic Openness in Negotiations, an ordinance adopted by the council in 2012. The law aims to provide more public oversight into labor negotiations, with independent fiscal analyses and each side’s offers made public. COIN also allows the council to have its own labor negotiator.

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Eastside development

The council will consider a second reading of a prezoning ordinance for a nearly 14-acre area of unincorporated county land, officially known as Santa Ana/Colleen Island.

The Eastside community, which Costa Mesa is looking to incorporate, has a 2.11-acre undeveloped parcel where a Newport Beach-based developer, Meadows Asset Management, wants to build 13 new single-family homes. The low-density project is tentatively called Harper’s Cove.

For the past several months, Meadows and city officials have been in talks with Santa Ana/Colleen residents, who were concerned about a development within the empty plot near their homes.

Peter Naghavi, a former Costa Mesa administrator who is representing Meadows on the project, told the Daily Pilot earlier this month that some of the development’s rear setback dimensions would exceed both the county and city requirements, thus making the project beneficial for all involved.

Specifically, Meadows is proposing larger rear setback spacing for seven of the new homes that would abut the eight houses’ backyards along Colleen Place.

Meadows’ current site plan for Harper’s Cove would require 6,000-square-foot minimum lot sizes — a reduction from the 6,600 square feet the council initially approved in June.

If the council decides to reduce the lot size requirements to 6,000 square feet, the ordinance would require an additional approval for adoption.

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