Looking Closely at Local Government : * City Council Decisions Aren’t Always Final, Especially When Voters Get Into the Act

If city councils in Orange County have the feeling somebody is watching, it isn’t just from the local cable TV broadcasts. Standing council decisions on development issues and on rent control have been put under a microscope in recent months by voters around the county.

The trend is worth noting. There seems to be an increasing willingness to take on the decisions of city fathers. There’s also money from the development community flooding into the local initiative process, and there’s recourse being taken in that court of last resort, the judicial system. All this comes at a time, mind you, when a general lack of voter participation and interest in politics is being deplored all across the nation.

The maxim that all politics is local may account for some of the passion at the grass-roots level. But there also is reason to wonder whether, in some cases, councils may respond to whoever makes the loudest noise at a particular time, without thinking through the long-terms implications of a particular decision.

Don’t tell that to the Irvine City Council, whose pro-development majority argued that the massive Westpark II project was studied and reviewed to the n th degree before being approved. But there was also a group opposed to the size and scale of the development that raised some credible questions about noise abatement, power lines and the prospect of congestion on local streets. The council pressed on with approval, and while that decision was affirmed narrowly in a referendum early this month, it took an enormous amount of campaign spending by the Irvine Co. to ensure victory. In Seal Beach, two separate council decisions on the Mola housing project were only starting points for a long-running saga of initiative and referendum that landed in the courts. In Laguna Beach last July, the council adopted an ordinance imposing rent control on mobile home parks after it had been heavily lobbied by park tenants, only to find opponents spending a record $160,000 in a successful campaign to defeat the measure.

People are indeed paying attention to local politics, and decisions made in council chambers may end up as only one chapter in an unfolding process. Obviously, for representative government to work, it would be good in many cases to know that voters have the confidence in their elected officials to let decisions stick.

The councils have known that the cameras were rolling, but they have fresh evidence from recent local initiatives that a good many folks also are taking notes.