This afternoon’s Irvine City Council meeting has a lot of heavy duty items on the agenda. The council is finally going to consider district elections — something the Irvine Unified School District did years ago. And there’s a item for adding two seats to the city council. District should be done first because it’s just unfair to add two new seats to the city council only to have possibly two council members residing in a single district, possibly for four years.
I’ve been reminded moving to district elections for city council has the support of noth only the Democratic Party of Orange County but also the State Democratic Party. Going to six specific district with a city wide election for mayor means four seats up for grabs every two years. Council member Tammy Kim fought this idea before an E-Board meeting of the DPOC last year and even had a presentation showing how moving to district might hurt Democrats (read into that…her specifically), yet the Party moved forward with its support for expansion and districting. Districting experts I’ve talked to tell me Kim shouldn’t be worried as there’s likely two Asian majority districts north of the 5 freeway, one of whch Kim resides in, that should continue diversity on the council. But its possible that she’d have to move into the district where her strongest suporters can be identified.
Our friends at Irvine Watchdog have an excellent piece on the evolution of how Irvine’s “rule of two” has been tossed and that’s worth a read. I’ll note that the last meeting, a proposed change to the city charter to call for no longer directly electing Irvine’s mayor was pulled, yet the public continued to speak out against the measure without a single speaker in agreement with the item put forwarded by Councilmember Mike Carroll and seconded by Kim, who then accused Mayor Farrah Khan of “political theater” by allowing the public to express displeasure at the idea.
Council member Agran asked for a second for district elections twice in 2021 — in May and July. With the rule of two finally gone, this idea will get the debate it deserves.
And would it be an Irvine City Council meeting without Council member Kim stealing another Agran idea as her own? Kim has agendized a discussion regarding ther All-American Asphalt Plant in North Irvine and it will be debated tonight. Here’s her memo:
All Kim had to do was second one of four previous memos Agran posted dating back to 2021 on this issue. She never did even as residents begged for council action. Here’s Agran’s last memo from January of this year regarding AAA:
Now with the rule of two gone, just where will Tammy Kim and Mike Carroll steal their ideas from?
The meeting is going to be a barnburner; get there early for a good seat.
Good article. Tammy now finds other ways to torpedo Agrans motions even without the Rule of 2. Demonstrated in last Tues agenda item 6.3 (district elections and separate motion for expanding cc size), she simply pretends to support something from Agran then at the last minute reverses course and votes against him with some tortured argument with logical fallacies.
sources are telling me the reason Tammy is against districts is it will hurt her fundraising and possibly her candidacy for re-election; she can raise money from anywhere. She is going to need to be accountable to voters for ideas brazenly stolen from Larry Agran and for not knowing basics of imminent domain.