• City Council Meeting June 2025

   TOP NEWS FROM THE MEETING

---

• Wildomar City Hall Goes Back to Five Days a Week
• Water Rates to Go Up By an Average of $15 Per Family of Four in July
• 20 Acre Park Update
• 2nd Motor Officer Added ($456K First Year Costs)

It was a great meeting. I encourage you to cue up the video (link will be at the bottom of the blog) and listen to it as it happened, but I'll give you a brief overview of the most noteworthy items in the half hour I have to put this blog together.

The biggest news of the night was delivered at the end, and was a surprise to at least two of the council members: City Hall will go back to five days a week from 7:30am to 6pm. 

That was something the council has been working towards since I got onto council in 2018. There were several things that kept it from happening over the years, but the final impediment was removed in April, and in less than two months, the will of the people was finally heeded. 

Thank you to Mayor Ashlee DePhillippo for being the final push getting this nailed down... kudos to you!

Water Rates Going Up

We knew this was coming. The State has a pie-in-the-sky approach to governing as they're trying to legislate perfection. 

tHaNk yOu, sAcRamENto, yoU'rE alWaYs lOokINg oUt foR Us. 

They are trying to regulate something known as PFAS in drinking water, which, if we're honest about it, is a veritable impossibility to illiminate no matter how desperately would like to. 

But what isn't impossible is to create regulations that make the precious resource more difficult for average people to afford. 

link to EVMWD's explanations for the rate hike

New Park Update

For those who don't know, the city bought about twenty acres of land from the lovely ladies who run Anne Sullivan Preschool about two years ago. It's directly to the east of the school, and continues southward down Palomar a bit.

They've been using it as a natural park to walk through, and they wanted the city to take it over and continue the "natural park" feel, instead of the other option: selling to a developer and building more houses.

There will be parking off Palomar, and the projected opening is less than a year away. There are no specifics this far out, but the city is contractually obligated to have it opened to the public by June of 2026. 

It'll look mostly like it does today. If there are ever further upgrades, that's years into the future, and many millions of dollars away.

Before it opens, we'll be giving it a proper name... be part of the process. 

2nd Motor Officer Approved

I was on record saying that I'd rather have more patrol time, or even more code enforcement, than a second motor officer at the cost of half a million dollars per year. We can't have everything.

Contrary to the well-meaning but misguided views of my learned council colleague Carlos Marquez, we will always be a small market team. 

I never said we were a minor league [team], but a small market [team]. 

Let's jump headlong into the baseball analogy... in this case, we're the Kansas City Royals. 

Kansas City isn't a minor league team like Lake Elsinore Storm, it simply doesn't have the capacity to compete with New York or Los Angeles, just as Wildomar doesn't have the capacity to compete with Temecula or Riverside. 

Their budgets dwarf ours, just as the Dodgers' ability to endlessly shell out greenbacks reminds the Royals who they are.

Sure, some people love sloganeering; it feels good, but I've never been much of a rah-rah guy boosting unrealistic things.

Let's not lose sight of who we are.

Plenty of small-market teams have won the World Series, and Wildomar can achieve excellence while not forgetting who we are. 

•                •                •

Last, but not least, (actually, this happened at the beginning of the meeting), Wildomar honored its first Employee of the Year, Dustin Wyatt.

Homegrown Dustin Wyatt of the public works team gets Wildomar's first employee of the year award. Back row is Councilmembers Dustin Nigg, Carlos Marquez, Bridgette Moore and Joseph Morabito. Mayor Ashlee is standing to Dustin Wyatt's right in the front of the dais.

 

link to the video