Irvine Political System Called ‘Out of Whack’ After Mailers

The hybrid campaign mailer that helped to defeat Supervisor Cynthia P. Coad in the March 5 election debuted in the Irvine city elections of 2000, when a traditional slate roster first was grafted onto a hard-hitting issue brochure.

A slate-mailer organization was formed that year by Ed Dornan, an ally of then-mayoral candidate Larry Agran, who had been elected to his second stint on the council in 1998.

Irvine limits campaign contributions to $320 per donor, but has no limits for slate mailers--mass mailings that list four or more candidates and ballot measures.

Dornan called his slate the Hometown Voter Guide. He took payments of $7,000 to $10,000 from council candidates Chris Mears, Beth Krom and Anthony Dragun--challengers hoping to fill the seats of incumbents Dave Christensen and Mike Ward, plus Agran’s council seat after his unopposed bid for mayor.

During the campaign, Hometown Voter Guide distributed 13 mailers in Irvine, including five pieces blasting Christensen, Ward and candidate Ken Hanson, an ally of Ward’s.

Three other mailers were promotions for Agran, Mears, Krom and Dragun.

Another five mailers backed Agran’s slate and three candidates for Irvine school board.

Ward won reelection but Christensen was defeated. Mears and Krom won seats on the council. School candidate Carolyn McInerney also won.

Dornan defended the slate mailers, saying they were “perfectly allowed” within local and state laws. The negative mailers--one of which featured a photo of a scowling Christensen--were “absolutely based on facts,” he said. “It’s a question of how you handle it.”

Agran, his candidates and Hometown Voter Guide spent more than $400,000 on city races, about half of it outside the reach of the city’s contribution limit, Councilman Greg Smith said.

“It threw Irvine’s local political system completely out of whack,” he said.

The source of the mailers was further muddled, Smith said, by a $45,000 contribution from the Safe and Healthy Communities Fund, a nonprofit group formed to fight the county’s efforts to build an airport at the closed El Toro Marine base.

The group is a foundation and not required to list its contributors.

After the election, John Oetken, Orange County coordinator for Common Cause, a good-government group, complained to the Irvine City Council about the slates.

He said the mailers too closely resembled campaign pieces and their source couldn’t be easily identified.

Several complaints about the Irvine election were filed with the state Fair Political Practices Commission, alleging the slate mailers were designed to skirt the laws.

The commission hasn’t announced any action as a result of the complaints.

Dornan said recently that he can’t take credit--or blame--for the hard-hitting mailers, which evolved out of a desire to do more than just list a person’s name. He said he doesn’t believe they led to the defeat of Christensen, who trailed top vote-getter Mears by more than 6,000 votes.

“I wish it were that simple,” he said.