Righeimer’s Rigmarole

COSTA MESA — I’ve got to hand it to Costa Mesa City Councilman Jim Righeimer, if nothing else, he’s a persistent little man. Yesterday, Costa Mesa’s PR flak Bill Lobdell announced that the trial date for the employee’s lawsuit to stop the wholesale outsourcing of city jobs is set for April 9th and that their high priced lawyers, hired to further Righeimers pipe-dream of outsourcing, have filed additional motions in order to rack up their billable hours and bury the courts in dead trees in the mean time. In addition to this, Righeimer now wants the City Attorney to explain how Costa Mesa can become a charter city in order to make it easy to outsource as many jobs as he wants.

The Orange County Register reports from last night’s Council meeting:

Costa Mesa could be a “grown-up city” and have more control over outsourcing and other issues if it becomes a charter city, Councilman Jim Righeimer said Tuesday night.

As it stands now, Costa Mesa is a general law city, which means it derives all of its powers from the state Legislature.

But, if Costa Mesa was a charter city like neighbors Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, or Irvine, it could do more in the way of pursuing outsourcing, Righeimer said. That is because the city would be able to determine its own set of laws and structure — independent of the legislature.

“Any other city right now can (outsource),” Righeimer said. “We have now gone through every process that our contract requires us to do and the labor unions require us to do … and yet in doing that process we are still being sued. We are going to spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to (complete this process).”

It is now becoming clear the Righeimer is going to blow through the million dollar slush fund set aside in this year’s budget for contingencies in no time at all. What Righeimer left out is the fact that the net result of the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” will be that the city, and taxpayers will lose. They will lose the case, all the money they spend on contract lawyers, and likely the money spent by the employees lawyers as well. Just like the County of Orange spent millions of dollars on Supervisor John Moorlach’s fools errand to overturn negotiated pension benefits for Sheriff’s deputies, Costa Mesa is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Righeimer’s Rigmarole.

According to Dictionary.com a rigmarole is: 1. an elaborate or complicated procedure: to go through the rigmarole of a formal dinner. 2. confused, incoherent, foolish, or meaningless talk.

In spite of the injunction in place that prevents the city from outsourcing public employee jobs to non-public entities, the city of Costa Mesa is still going through the expensive rigmarole of requesting proposals to perform services that cannot be outsourced by law. Seeking proposals to perform services that cannot be contracted out is the very definition of “meaningless talk.”

The Costa Mesa City Council needs to simply stop enabling Righeimer’s Rigmarole, CANCEL THE LAYOFFS, and start working with their employee partners to help keep the city financially stable.

UPDATE: This leads me to our new word of the day – Righeimarole: An elaborate or complicated and expensive procedure to implement the confused, incoherent, foolish, or meaningless efforts of Costa Mesa City Councilman Jim Righeimer to needlessly outsource municipal jobs.