Huntington Beach City Council campaign season kicks off with a forum
Three days before the filing period for this year’s Huntington Beach City Council race even opened, eight candidates showed up for a forum Friday night at Redeemer Lutheran Church.
Getting out ahead of what is expected to be another large race isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“It’s a Friday night in July for a November election,” candidate Tony Strickland said in his opening remarks, addressing the audience of about 40 people. “A lot of you obviously deeply care about the future of Huntington Beach, and that’s why you’re here. You’re the diehard of the diehards.”
A majority of the City Council seats — four of the seven — are expected to be open in the November election, with Mayor Barbara Delgleize, Mayor Pro Tem Mike Posey and Erik Peterson terming out and Kim Carr electing to run for the state Senate.
Russell Neal moderated the forum. Of the 15 candidates who were invited, the eight who came were Pat Burns, Amory Hanson, Casey McKeon, Michael Olsberg, Strickland, Gracey Van Der Mark, Kenneth Inouye and Michael Vogler. Jeff Hansler also introduced himself as a stand-in for candidate Bob Reider, who was at home recovering from hip surgery.
The 90-minute forum was put on by the organization “¡Basta!” an Italian word that roughly translates to “that’s enough.” Neal was one of the proponents of the “Save Surf City” recall that attempted to ouster five of the current council candidates.
When he posed a starter question about high-density development at the forum, most of the candidates had similar answers, stating their opposition to it.
Many of the candidates in attendance Friday shared a conservative viewpoint; four of the eight identified themselves as Republicans in a questionnaire circulated at the forum, with one Democrat (Inouye), one Libertarian (Olsberg) and one Independent (Hanson).
Van Der Mark finished fourth in the 2020 City Council election when there were three seats open and has served on the city’s finance and planning commissions. She said she is now a grandmother and is concerned about her grandson’s safety.
“If you look at our schools today, now they are fenced in,” she said. “Moms can’t take our kids to the park without moving their feet on the sand to look for hypodermic needles or paraphernalia. Their kids can’t use the slides without checking for feces or urine, to make sure they’re safe for their children … Our kids shouldn’t have to be exposed to this just because our current City Council is not making our city safe.”
Van Der Mark, former finance commissioner McKeon, Burns and Strickland are unofficially running together for the four seats. Van Der Mark and McKeon had a similar strategy with Tito Ortiz in 2020, but the former mixed martial arts fighter was the only one to earn a seat, then he resigned from the council in June 2021.
Burns is a former police officer in Long Beach for nearly 30 years, he said, while Strickland touted his experience serving six years in the state Assembly and four years in the state Senate. He noted that after the November election, no one on the City Council will have more than two years’ experience.
Olsberg, a chemistry teacher at Fountain Valley High, is also a Junior Lifeguards instructor.
He answered a question about electric cars by reminding those in attendance that Huntington Beach High’s mascot is the Oilers.
“I don’t want to rely on the silicon and the other rare earth minerals that we have to pull out of the earth,” he said. “We pull them out using hydrocarbons. Where will we park these electric cars? I don’t know, but hydrocarbons are a gift that was given to us. They have high amount of energy and a low amount of volume, and I don’t know why we aren’t making better use of the natural resources that we have.”
Vogler said it is important to protect against overdevelopment of the city and let housing decisions be made by locals, not Sacramento.
“It’s not just housing,” he said. “It’s traffic. It’s sewer services. It’s police services. It’s fire. These all must be calculated into the equation of how we want to develop our city. We’re not a high-rise city; we’re a low-rise city.”
Inouye said he was running for public office for the first time. A 49-year resident of Huntington Beach, he is a former chairman of the Human Relations Task Force.
“I saw people come together from all different sides of the aisle to try to make this community as good as could be,” he said. “At this time, I made the decision to run again because I’d like to see Huntington Beach be the best that it can be. The opportunity to have a difference of opinion is part of what makes America great.”
The filing window for Huntington Beach City Council election started Monday and runs until Aug. 12.
All the latest on Orange County from Orange County.
Get our free TimesOC newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Daily Pilot.
