Laguna Beach and school district plan collaboration on pool, sustainability and safety

Mayor Alex Renaghi told Fair Game Laguna Beach that a planned joint meeting with the Laguna Beach School District produced areas of consensus on facilities, sustainability and safety.

"Weare separate and distinct entities. We have a different role than the school board does. But at the end of the day, we all ... have an investment in having the best schools that can that can exist," Renaghi said. He said the parties agreed to move forward with a memorandum of understanding on a proposed 45-meter pool and to collaborate on sustainability and energy-efficiency initiatives.

Renaghi described the school district's sustainability plan as "ambitious" and quoted a target in the district document as "02/1930"; that phrasing is from the document he read and was not clarified on air. He said the city and the district discussed coordinating on solar procurement and leveraging tax credits and other incentives to reduce long-term energy costs.

The mayor said public-safety topics included a problem with people entering school-district open space where illegal access has raised concerns about wildfire risk; he said Laguna Beach Police Chief Calvert raised the issue. Renaghi also described an ongoing technical problem around 911 calls in the El Morro area that sometimes route to the Orange County Sheriff's Department rather than the Laguna Beach Police Department and said staff are working to fix the dispatch routing to reduce delay.

Renaghi also noted the long-standing shared funding for school resource officers, saying the city and district split funding for two officers on a 50/50 basis.

The radio segment reports steps toward cooperation rather than any formal, signed agreement recorded during the interview.