Anaheim’s resort politics no picnic for councilwoman

Lucille Kring has been on the Anaheim City Council only since December, but so much for the honeymoon period. Already, recriminations, second-guessing and anger.

In five short months she’s found herself just where she says she doesn’t like to be -- in the middle of controversy. And not only does she not relish the looming combat; she says it can be avoided with a little statesmanship.

One suspects the lady is overly optimistic.

It’s been a week since Kring’s official coming-out party, when she waited out 50 speakers before casting the deciding vote in a 3-2 decision to approve a zoning change in the city’s resort district to allow housing, including a proposed 225 units for low-income residents.

The vote portends fierce political fighting in the city. The Disney Co. has made no secret of its disdain for the project and has already forced Kring to the sidelines once with a suggestion two months ago that she might have a conflict of interest if she voted on the matter.

As it turned out, she didn’t. And last Tuesday night, she cast the vote that Disney apparently had well-founded reason to fear.

She says she didn’t know how she’d vote until the procession of pro and con speakers had finished. Not even her council assistant knew how she’d vote, Kring says. In remarks preceding her vote, she said she’d prayed and agonized over it and didn’t envy her colleagues for having to make such a tough decision.

And so, how has your last week gone, Ms. Kring?

“I’m not really fond of controversy,” she says over the phone late Monday afternoon. “I always wanted to be on the council, but I never in a million years expected this kind of controversy and over this kind of project.”

That’s because the previous council had supported it. That withered away as Disney got serious in its opposition. Which included a lawsuit to block the zone change.

Kring served on the council from 1998 to 2002 but didn’t run again to poke a stick in Disney’s eye. She likes the company, she says, she really likes it. She likes California Adventure and Downtown Disney and everything included in “the Disney way.”

She isn’t thrilled, however, that Disney has sued the city. She says she’s of the school that doesn’t favor lawsuits as first-strike options. Besides, she predicts, the developer, SunCal, will ultimately come in with a “compromise” project that will be smaller than the 1,500 units most frequently mentioned in the months before the council vote.

Kring isn’t convinced that housing -- much of it market-rate -- will sabotage the city’s resort district.

Nor does she see why a private developer shouldn’t be allowed to build a project if it satisfies certain requirements. She also was influenced by the fact that mobile homes already had existed in the so-called resort district.

I ask if she’s eager for the next few months, during which the housing project will take shape. “The next few months can be what we want it to be,” she says.

“It can be exciting if we work together or miserable if we’re in a quagmire. I tried to get Disney and SunCal at the table. I believe in heading off problems before they start. That didn’t happen, and we are where we are now, we can’t un-ring the bell.”

And whether she likes it or not, there’s going to be some political head-knocking. Even though, as she says, she’d rather focus on other projects up and running around the city, not to mention the Ducks in the NHL playoffs and the Angels expecting to be pennant contenders.

There’s playoff pressure and then there’s political pressure. The Ducks may be feeling the former, but Kring is feeling the latter.

“Of course, I’m feeling the pressure,” she says.

“My husband even said, ‘I can feel this pressure and this stress. I can’t imagine what you’re going through.’ You try to do the right thing. We’re human and we make mistakes, but I believe in this case, my vote was a good vote and we’ll go on.”

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Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns: www.latimes.com/parsons