Are Irvine Leaders Being Sneaky With Great Park? Maybe Scouts Can Tell Us

Because it had to bug out early the other night at the Irvine City Council meeting, a troop of Boy Scouts didn’t get to weigh in on the moral question of the night:

Is the three-member council majority a slick-talking, power-grabbing trio or merely the target of ill-informed or misguided opponents?

Had the Scouts, known for their sense of virtue, been able to hang in there for the two-hour debate, I’d have loved to get their take.

Dissenters Christina Shea and Steven Choi see a council majority that betrayed a three-year public trust by declaring that the Irvine council has final say on all major decisions affecting the Great Park. Shea and Choi say the clear intent of park planning has been all along that a nine-member board would be the decision-makers.

Their council colleagues -- Mayor Beth Krom, Larry Agran and Sukhee Kang -- are indignant at the betrayal charge and say the council has always had the final authority. Even if it wasn’t obvious to outsiders.

All this might sound like just another evening of bureaucratic semantics -- and at times it sounded exactly like that -- except that the yet-to-sprout Great Park, on the former El Toro Marine base, is billed as a potential billion-dollar project that will rival any of America’s great urban parks.

With that much money and with expectations that high, it matters what people at the nerve center of the operation say and do.

The narrow issue is whether the Irvine council misled people from the get-go. Two weeks ago, the three-member majority asserted its ultimate authority, a position that rattled Shea, Choi, the Orange County Board of Supervisors and who knows who else. County Supervisor Bill Campbell told the council Tuesday night that its action had the effect of reducing the park board to “an advisory board.”

The dissenters argue that Irvine portrayed the Great Park as a countywide jewel, to be run by an independent board. As such, the board would serve as a “buffer” for Irvine taxpayers, ensuring that they wouldn’t be dinged financially if unforeseen problems arise.

“This has been our promise and our intent for nearly three years,” Shea argued.

Agran, in particular, has been dishonest on the matter, Shea said. She accused her longtime political foe of talking “out of both sides of his mouth.” Choi said the matter represents an “integrity issue.”

The council majority had an orchestrated two-pronged reply. The three said their decision April 25 clarified the relationship between the council and the park board but didn’t alter it. Krom noted that the Irvine council had quietly supported all the board’s major decisions thus far, making it seem the decisions were solely those of the park board. Therefore, she said, it wasn’t obvious that the board needed council approval of any significant decision.

Well, it’s obvious now, and Agran wasn’t apologizing for it. What Shea proposes, Agran said, “is that the city surrender the land and surrender the money to the [park management]. I don’t believe that’s the appropriate thing to do.”

Citing Irvine’s role in defeating the proposed international airport at the closed base, Agran suggested the city has both legal and logical weight behind it. If the corporation had sole discretion over the parkland and money, he said, it theoretically could “build some honky-tonk amusement park that the people of Irvine hated.”

The council majority said Irvine’s track record of municipal planning and creativity in getting the park project moving quickly makes it the best final arbiter on major decisions.

The majority sounded like it believed itself. The three didn’t so much as make a nod to the charge that they might have misled county residents, not to mention two of their own colleagues and all five county supervisors.

They seemed oblivious as to why outsiders might question how much authority a nine-member board has when the Irvine council has final say. And, by the way, five of the nine board members are the Irvine council members.

I could use the Scouts here, but the heart of the matter is that Irvine probably thought a few years ago that it wouldn’t play well if the public thought the city had veto power over park decisions. Better to deliver that message at a later date.

The cautionary tale here is that if three council members have confused their own colleagues, what level of confidence should the rest of us have for them as the park plan unfolds?

My guess? The public doesn’t care.

The masses ultimately will judge Irvine on the greatness of the park. And if Irvine residents get hit up, as Shea and Choi fear they might, no one outside Irvine will care.

Ain’t gonna happen, the three-member majority said.

“There is absolutely no chance on Earth that [the park’s] planning, design and construction is going to jeopardize [Irvine’s] general fund at all,” Agran said.

And, lest you worry, here are Kang’s soothing words: “The residents of Irvine and the people of Orange County know the Great Park project is in good hands with the Irvine City Council.”