Irvine’s Next Mayor Comes With High Voltage

His victory assured, his political stock on the rise, Larry Agran is once again poised to step into the glare of Orange County politics.

Next month, Agran will be elected mayor of Irvine, a job he ambitiously molded and shaped during a six-year tenure before being defeated in 1990. This time, with no opponent to distract him and no need to fund a campaign, he is concentrating on pulling the three other candidates in his slate onto the council for a ruling majority.

Yet, even as Agran looks to a full return to prominence as one of the county’s six directly elected mayors, there’s a chill that runs through Irvine and its neighbors to the south.

Some worry that, given his aggressive style, Agran could crack the unity of South County as it battles plans for an airport at the closed El Toro Marine base.

“If Larry’s slate gets elected and takes the majority, it has the potential to break up the South County coalition,” said Councilman Mike Ward, who had planned to challenge Agran for mayor but ultimately decided he didn’t have the money to bankroll such a campaign.

Ward said Agran can flash with an in-your-face contrariness that could lead him to break ranks with the rest of South County if he disagrees with their vision for El Toro.

“He makes things a lot harder on everyone,” said Tristan Krogius, a Dana Point resident active in the anti-airport movement.

Mission Viejo Councilwoman Susan Withrow, chairwoman of the powerful El Toro Reuse Planning Authority, an eight city anti-airport coalition, agreed that Agran can be an irritant. “He’s ticked off a lot of people in South County. . . . His approach is that it’s Larry’s way or no way, and that doesn’t work in a democracy.”

Stung, Agran said he’s being criticized for taking a more aggressive anti-airport stance. And there’s a subtext to the criticism, he said: He is a Democrat in a Republican stronghold. While the mayor’s office is nonpartisan, an entrenched GOP network is fearful of losing political control in South County, he said.

Agran was defeated in office 10 years ago, partially on the strength of a $25,000 campaign financed by the Lincoln Club, a well-heeled Republican organization. Undaunted, Agran set his sights somewhat higher by running for president, a quixotic effort that for years left him soured on party politics. Elected to the Irvine council again in 1998, Agran said he is just another soldier in the fight to prevent the former Marine base from becoming an international airport.

“Portraying me as some kind of wild-eyed radical isn’t supported in the record,” said Agran, 55. “I like to think of myself as a very practical ‘doer’ when it comes to the environment, open space, recycling and social programs that make sense for the city.”

Several political activists said it is Agran’s slow-growth agenda that most frightens the county’s conservative establishment. Though South County Republicans formed an alliance with slow-growth leaders like Agran to fight the airport, that zeal stops at the end of the runway.

“If Larry wants to be mayor of Irvine, there’s a symbolic distaste to that,” said GOP activist and Irvine resident Howard Klein, “but if Larry controls the City Council with a slate on the council, that’s worrisome. It could form the nucleus for the organization of a left-of-center cadre of political people.”

Agran and controversy are old friends.

First elected in 1978 when Irvine was still growing and maturing, Agran became the chief progenitor of the city’s liberal movement. He served a pair of two-year stints as mayor during the early and mid-80s and then became its first directly elected mayor in 1988.

It was a heady time. City voters set aside 8,000 acres for perpetual open space. The council, with Agran’s guidance, became the first to require a reduction in the use of ozone-depleting chemicals, set up child-care programs and established the county’s first curbside recycling program.

Some efforts were less successful. Irvine voters repealed protections for gays and lesbians within the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance, and a plan to house the homeless in the city’s former animal shelter was abandoned after protests.

When he hosted visiting members of the Nicaraguan baseball team while that nation was controlled by Marxist-led Sandinistas, angry conservatives branded Agran and his supporters “Agranistas.” The term lingers still.

Years later, when he returned to hometown politics, it was as the founder of Project 99, a nonprofit, anti-airport organization that took root in 1997.

Irvine is a very different place than it was in the late 1980s, said Mark Petracca, a UC Irvine political science professor and longtime Agran backer. About a third of the electorate is new and identifies Agran with his efforts to kill the El Toro airport, he said.

“All of the people who liked what Larry did in the 1980s and are still here are still his supporters,” Petracca said. “People who didn’t like what he did now represent a much smaller percentage of the electorate.”

Even so, Agran’s legacy in office has become definitive of Irvine: focusing on affordable housing, seniors, the disabled, reaching out to other cities and issues abroad. “All of those things characterize the political life of the city,” Petracca said.

Agran said concerns that he’ll have a corrosive effect on anti-airport unity are “nonsense,” and vows that he will defer the lead anti-airport role to the eight-city coalition that is leading the charge against El Toro.

Agran said the truth is that he is responsible for turning the tide against an airport. He said El Toro foes were stuck in a rut until he returned to the council and kick-started the fight with more money, lawsuits and public pressure. The “cozy Republican stuff was the debilitating factor,” he said, referring to partisan relationships among those on both sides of the issue.

“We now have the upper hand because I came forward with a plan,” Agran said. “I breathed some life into [the anti-airport coalition] in the first place. I’m not going to extinguish that.”

At issue is whether Irvine, which has spent more than $10 million fighting an airport, will jump tracks and get behind Agran’s dream for the closed Marine base: the Great Park. Agran has made city support for the park one of his central goals. Other South County cities back the Millennium Plan, a blend of parkland, high-tech businesses and homes. Agran once backed that plan too.

Lake Forest Mayor Richard T. Dixon, for instance, said South County has a vision for the 4,700-acre Marine base that is broader than Agran’s notion of using the land for a sprawling park complete with university and museum.

“Those of us opposed to an airport are interested in a nonaviation reuse,” Dixon said. “I would expect him not to move forward in a dramatic way without consulting and discussing first with the entire coalition.”

David Ellis, a Republican consultant who favors an airport at El Toro, said Agran’s forte has been to use public money to fund personal causes. The Great Park plan, for example, was developed using a city-paid consultant.

“He’s a committed liberal, and you’ve got to respect him for that,” Ellis said.

Until recently, the mayor’s race had caused little stir in Republican circles in South County. Even Thomas A. Fuentes, the longtime chairman of the county GOP and a Lake Forest resident, joined Agran in promoting the Great Park plan. Agran demurred in endorsing Fuentes’ suggestion that the park be named after Richard Nixon, however.

But such politeness turned to outright discord at a recent Irvine council meeting. Colleagues, residents, even former allies took turns pounding on Agran during a nasty five-hour debate over the future of the James A. Musick Branch Jail, a low-security facility on the eastern flank of Irvine. Agran, according to those who joined in the ruckus, was transparent in his attempt to make political hay out of the jail issue to boost the profile of his slate of candidates.

Agran says he is under attack for political reasons and that his positions, whether on the airport or the proposed jail expansion, are relevant, vital matters in Irvine and cities to the south. “I feel very in tune with the people of this city,” he said.

“The pity and the tragedy is that a lot of us believed in Larry and believed he’d changed,” Councilman Larry Christensen said. “I don’t believe in Larry Agran anymore.”

But Petracca, who came away astounded by what he considered outright campaigning from the dais, was skeptical about the hand-wringing.

“If they were so worried about Larry, why didn’t one of them run for mayor?”