ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Is This Trip Necessary?

As a councilwoman, Irvine Mayor Sally Anne Sheridan opposed the establishment of a sister-city relationship with Tsukuba, Japan. Now that she’s mayor, she’s planning to lead an Irvine delegation there in November. Sayonara consistency.

What’s changed in a year?

Apparently, a junket is no longer a junket when your political adversary is out of office and you are in his seat. She had first argued for paying attention to local issues but ended up saying prior commitments must be met. Even before Sheridan has boarded a plane, she’s sending a signal that she’s one mayor who doesn’t travel well.

Ex-Mayor Larry Agran had wanted to send city department heads to Tsukuba so that they could engage in a meaningful work-related exchange of technical information that would benefit programs of both cities. All the while, Sheridan was making political hay, saying Irvine officials should stay home and take care of potholes. She made that argument strongly enough to get her own ticket to the mayor’s office last spring.

But now the Japan trip is at hand. Under the new administration, the city manager now says that Sheridan and council members must go because their Japanese hosts want high-level dignitaries, not staffers as Irvine originally planned. And the city must not offend its hosts, even if sending council members and the mayor will make it somehow less of a working trip than originally envisioned.

Sheridan now argues the city must keep its promises. Meanwhile, the trip had evolved from the working visit proposed by Agran to include such stops as a traditional Japanese farmhouse, a geological museum and side trips to shrines, gardens and museums. But if Irvine officials are so worried about what the Japanese would think of the delegation’s composition, how are the hosts to interpret Sheridan’s disdain for the entire sister-city program in the first place?

Councilwoman Paula Werner, one of those planning to go, has expressed due concern about some of these issues. She was at first worried enough about there being so little business on the agenda that work had to be found for the trip. And then at the end of last week, Werner could contain her embarrassment no more: she decided to write a $734 check to the city to stave off any charges that she was participating in a junket.

Yes, all politics is local after all. Even when it involves a new mayor’s forays into international affairs on a $90,000 sister-city program inherited from a previous administration.