Laguna Beach City Council set to select next mayor

The Laguna Beach City Council is scheduled to meet for the only time during December on Tuesday, and will determine the city’s next mayor and mayor pro tempore.

For the first time in three years, the expectation is that the coastal town will have a new mayor.

Bob Whalen, who has served as the mayor of Laguna Beach in three consecutive terms since 2019, indicated that he believes that there will be a transition with a new council member leading the five-person panel in the year to come.

“It’s the meeting where we do transition mayors,” Whalen said on the Laguna Beach City Chats podcast on Thursday.

“We haven’t done that in the last couple of years. I’ve been, three years running now, the mayor, but I’m confident there will be a change Tuesday night, and most likely, our mayor pro tem Sue Kempf, I think, will be the likely choice of the council.”

Whalen was asked to look back on the defining moments of his tenure as mayor.

“The most memorable, I think, has to be just dealing with the response to COVID,” Whalen said. “It was otherworldly in March of 2020 when we were looking at staying home and shutting down the city.

“We shut down the beaches for 41 days. We were interfacing with the governor’s office and got those back reopened, and just responding, too, on a daily basis to decide what’s the right thing to do here for our community to keep us safe, but to keep our businesses at the same time alive.”

Under its consent calendar, the council plans to consider a resolution that would allow for the city’s public meetings to continue to be virtual.

The resolution says that public meetings are being held during a state of emergency and that if meetings were held exclusively in an in-person manner, it “would present imminent risks to the health and safety of attendees.”

The council will also consider a 60-day extension of the city’s emergency declaration with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the local emergency was declared on March 17, 2020, there have been 11 extensions.

Approval of the resolution gives the city manager, Shohreh Dupuis, the ability to issue and enforce regulations designed to mitigate the spread of the virus. The Omicron variant has become a new cause for concern for the health community.

The regular meeting will begin at 5 p.m. with options to participate in person and online. The meeting can be viewed on Cox cable channel 852, as well as via Zoom.

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