Candidate Forum - Random Observations

The Candidate forum last night was the most poorly attended in recent memory, which is a shame because the format was excellent and people got a really good chance to see whom the candidates were. Jim Richert and Bob Holtzclaw did a great job, and Lake 2, as usual, were fine hosts. But less than 70 people were in attendance, and when you filter out the relatives of the candidates, there were probably only a few dozen citizens.

Here are some random thoughts.

Liz Miller was the big surprise, offering well thought out visions, and a good assessment of the challenges we face. The other newcomers also did a good job – Tom Cagley and Mike Healey. They start with the fact that our quality of life is pretty good and look at how it can be better.

• · Crime isn’t rampant but it is high in some areas and we are higher than most of our neighbors. What can we do to make it better?
• · We have some good amenities (Etnies, the new Sports Park) but why don’t we have a senior center, a dog park, a community garden, a civic center?
• · There are some attempts to deal with traffic, but these are too few, have too little impact, and are practically meaningless given the 42,000+ new vehicle trips per day we are adding to the City.

The incumbents were defensive, to be point of laughter.

• · We had no choice but to agree to expanding Musick Jail and adding maximum security prisoners. So what if Irvine fought and still fights the good fight.
• · We had to build 5,000 more new homes and flood the city with 12,000+ new people and 42,000+ new vehicles per day because the developers wanted to build homes. And we want to be friendly to builders, especially since they give us money for our campaigns.
• · Don’t worry about senior centers, community gardens, civic centers, etc. We are planning to have them and sometime in the future we will have them.

Of course, Scott Voigts and Kathy McCullough couldn’t let an occasion like this go by without lying.

• · McCullough claims, once again, that she never raised more than $30,000 for her campaigns when the plain facts show she raised more than that, and because her state mandated forms are so corrupt and incomplete it’s really impossible to know how much she really did collect. BTW – McCullough is under investigation by the FPPC right now and I will have a detailed report about that next week.
• · McCullough claims, once again, that she gets most of her money from her friends, when in fact the data clearly show that she gets thousands of dollars from companies like Waste Management, companies that do business with the City.
• · Scott Voigts claims he invented OC Alert (maybe we should introduce him to Al Gore who invented the Internet), and furthermore claims, falsely, that it will alert us when killers escape from Musick Jail and roam our streets.
• · Voigts also claims that he’s responsible for the decrease in the unemployment level in Lake Forest, despite the fact that unemployment is down almost everywhere (for which he took no credit).

Andrew Hamilton stressed the fact that he’s been involved in the Planning Commission (PC), but never mentioned the fiasco that has been made of the PC since he joined it – more appeals, more overturned decisions, more expenses, longer meetings with fewer accomplishments, more postponements, more cancelled meetings, etc.

Hamilton also let it be known that he’s happy to accept money from companies doing business with the City. He calls it their “freedom of speech” and, in turn, his freedom of speech to give them what they ask for.

It was nice to see former candidates Ken Carrell and Marcia Rudolph in the audience. Mayor Robinson and Mayor Pro Tem Nick hid in the last rows where they seemed to enjoy the proceedings.

I spoke with nearly a dozen people after the forum and everyone was in agreement that the “old guard” needs to make room for the “new guard”, and the “new guard” was pretty impressive in their new ideas, knowledge, and refusal to accept the inadequacies of the past as prologue to our future.

The “old guard” spent most of their time defending their paltry and sometimes harmful actions, while the “new guard” focused on new ways to make the City better.

About Jim Gardner

Dr. Jim Gardner is running for City Council in Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook.