I spent a little time over at Christina Shea’s “Shea for Mayor” website and my mouth actually fell open at what I saw. There’s a logo of the Big Orange Balloon at the Great Park with the tagline “Keep Irvine Great.” My God, now I know why there was a 5.4 quake last week — has Shea joined the same ticket with Larry Agran!?
Nope. Just a little plagiarism I’m afraid. Though after listening to Shea complain about the high cost of the “free” balloon rides at the Great Park’s preview park on KUCI last Tuesday, I’m surprised she’d stoop to using it as a logo on her own site. I guess an answering machine isn’t a very flattering graphic. Psst. Christina. Kurt isn’t Larry’s best friend. Stop saying that OK?Â
Here’s the real Keep Irvine Great site.
What’s particularly telling is something in the Bio:
When powerful interests tried to transform El Toro Marine Base into an international airport, I joined many South County elected leaders and thousands of citizens in a grassroots campaign to save our heritage and our future. We advanced a different vision, the Great Park (Measure W), which the voters of Orange County passed in March 2002.
The only problem with all this is Shea was out of office in March 2002 when all the real heavy lifting was being done by members of the Keep Irvine Great ticket (Beth Krom and Larry Agran). When Shea left office at the end of 2000, the was no significant progress in stopping the airport under her watch as mayor. And it was soundly defeated while she was out of office. But this is more of Shea claiming credit for something she didn’t do while using a symbol of something she doesn’t like (the balloon) to promote her candidacy. Her efforts to stop the airport bore no fruit. And when it was stopped, her contribution to stopping it was the same as tens of thousands of us who wrote legislators.
Shea did make a particularly heartless comment made on KUCI’s The OC Show Tuesday afternoon. It dealt with her Mayoral opponent Sukhee Kang’s program to have city staff assist low income families apply for state health insurance. Shea’s comments were along the lines of “if the state is going to give you (a low income person) free healthcare, you could at least drive to Santa Ana to fill out the forms yourself.” Not all low income families have a car, nor the flexibility to get to Santa Ana on buslines to match work schedules and when the office is opening. A little compassion wouldn’t hurt you.
The cost to the city for this program is about $200,000; or its triple the cost of a feasibility study Shea and the Irvine City Council pushed for in the late 1990s to pay Arthur Anderson (the guys who audited Enron) to study the possibility of placing an NFL team at the closed El Toro base (of which, Shea had a nice little fact finding trip to North Carolina to see the Pathners new facility; I guess she forgot that Chargers were in San Diego).
That’s a principal difference between the two candidates for mayor; one shows compassion and the other doesn’t.