Tuesday’s Irvine City Council has two significant items on the agenda pushed forward by Vice Mayor Tammy Kim and Council member Mike Carroll — a formal resolution supporting a Veteran’s cemetery in Anaheim Hills and a change in Brown Act Agenda procedures that effectively kills Irvine’s longstanding “Sunshine Ordinance” that allows the public to have a 12 day review of agenda items.
On the Veteran’s cemetery issue, the entire point of placing it at the Great Park at ARDA was to give Vets a final resting place where many served. FivePoint has fought this development every step of the way because they want the ARDA site for their own use. Irvine residents overwhelmingly passed Measure B to deny the Developer a landswap. The city council affirmed the ARDA site last year but abandoned tis position in favor of the developer.
Perhaps it’s time for another costly ballot measure since this council has failed to learn the lessons of the recent past.
Both State Senators Dave Min and Tom Umberg were in support of the ARDA site. Rep. Katie Porter just came out in support of the Gypsum Canyon Site in Anaheim Hills but offered no federal monetary options. The County BoS committed a nominal amount. And the argument against ARDA is that it’s too expensive and too close to homes. Apply that to Gypsum Canyon which is going to need significant new roads, water/sewage, electricity and the site itself is prone to wildfires and mudslides. If ARDA is costly, Gypsum Canyon is crazy expensive. Hundreds of millions of dollars expensive.
The sad part of all this is that not to long ago, the City of Irvine was 10 days away from starting demolition of the ARDA site to begin construction of the cemetery when then-council member Melissa Fox, claiming confusion on a motion, changed her vote to allow a discussion of a possible FivePoint landswap which halted everything. She then led the fight against Measure B which was a referendum led by Larry Agran to step the landswap. When Irvine voters overwhelming sided with Agran on the issue, she completely flip flopped and sided with him on ARDA. If you want to point a finger at who’s to blame for no Veteran’s cemetery in Irvine, point to Emile Haddad and Starpointe Venture’s Patrick Strader. And then send a Raven to La Quinta where Ms. Fox (and family) now reside. Hope that Balloon ride with FivePoint was worth it.
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On the proposed “change to Brown Act Agenda procedures,” is another way for this city council to slip agenda items in at the last minute given the public little time to react. So simply put, claiming that providing advanced notice for the public about the public’s business is unwieldy or a burden on staff is bull. Repealing the Sunshine ordinance has the opposite effect but giving the public and voters even less time to digest city business and react accordingly. Today, agenda publication deadlines for regular City Council meetings are 12 days. Vice Mayor Kim and Council member Carroll want to cut ths to three days. The argument is the agenda for an upcoming City Council meeting to be published only two days after the preceding City Council meeting compresses the timelines for completing agenda reports and requires edits for supplemental agendas.\
From the memo: “This multiplies the work required of City staff. It also makes the City Council less able to address emerging issues as quickly as other government agencies. The Brown Act already includes tried and tested procedures and timelines for agenda publication. Its basic requirement for regular meetings is 72 hours prior publication for regular meetings and 24 hours prior publication for special meetings. In practice, the Irvine City Clerk’s office typically publishes agendas on the Thursday preceding the Tuesday City Council meetings, resulting in five days prior notice of regular meetings. That is already 67% more than the Brown Act requires. Therefore, to reduce the burden on staff, make the City more responsive to emerging issues, and maintain a high degree of transparency, we request that the City Council consider the adoption of the attached Ordinance rescinding Ordinance 18-10.”
The only high degree of transparency this ordinance would deliver is a way for the developers seeking council votes an easy way to hide until the last possible moment – a political jump scare just in time for Halloween.
The council should vote no on this.
The Gypsum Canyon is a landslide area, not far from a National Veterans Cemetery in Riverside but if you put a Veterans Cemetery with a public cemetery it will not be a National Veterans cemetery but you can still be buried there as a Veteran but you will have to pay for it or the VA will allot you some money to be buried there. There’s no infrastructure! Also, with this resolution by Carroll and Kim is saying we don’t want Veterans and their Cemetery in Irvine so to me that’s the biggest disgrace! The Irvine Veterans want it in Irvine!
The Gypsum Canyon is a landslide area, not far from a National Veterans Cemetery in Riverside but if you put a Veterans Cemetery with a public cemetery it will not be a National Veterans cemetery but you can still be buried there as a Veteran but you will have to pay for it or the VA will allot you some money to be buried there. There’s no infrastructure! Also, with this resolution by Carroll and Kim is saying we don’t want Veterans and their Cemetery in Irvine so to me that’s the biggest disgrace! The Irvine Veterans want it in Irvine!
The Gypsum Canyon site is not geological viable nor ecological viable. If the 4 on the city Council are interested in getting along then drop the anti democratic rule of 2!