Council Review for April 18

In the city council meeting Tuesday night all the motions were unanimously approved, except for the proposed anti-corruption ordinance which failed by a 3:2 vote. The Council people who take the special interests money (Hamilton, Voigts, Robinson) voted to keep the money flowing. They rejected the idea of campaign limits on individuals and on companies doing business with the City.

ROBINSON'S DEFENSE

According to Robinson, if we passed these ordinances, people or companies who wanted to buy votes could still get their money to their chosen candidates, using Political Action Groups (PACs) or donating to “Independent Expenditure” (IE) Committees. In fact, PACs and IEs are exempt from city ordinances and they have provided over $100,000 to Hamilton, Voigts, and Robinson, so this avenue would still be available.

In response, I said - “Don’t vote for these ordinances because they will stop 100% of the special interest money from corrupting our system, vote for them because it’s the right thing to do”. Those words were lost on the 3 people who depend on special interest money to get in office and to stay there (For example, by my calculations, less than 1% of Andrew Hamilton’s campaign contributions came from Lake Forest residents, so decreasing special interest money would virtually bankrupt his campaign. Voigts is only slightly better off).

Robinson is mistaken when he says that PACs and IEs will “hide” the money. PACs and IEs have (more or less) the same reporting requirements as candidates. So if CR&R (our waste management company) and Athens Services (our street sweepers) wanted to set us an IE Committee called “We Want to Buy Your Vote”, and spend $10,000 to keep the Gang of 3 in power, we can still discover that those companies were behind the IEs.

But Robinson isn’t interested in the facts, just the money.

HAMILTON'S DEFENSE

Hamilton claims that taking special interest money has no impact on his votes. Hamilton, who is being recalled for, among other things, taking money from special interests and voting 100% of the time in their favor, denied that he voted 100% of the time for the special interests, but refused to give a single example in which he voted against a person or company who contributed to his campaign.

OTOH, we can give many examples of Hamilton’s votes for special interests. For example, Hamilton took over $25,000 from developers and the building industry and voted to

• Approve developer agreement for Baker Ranch (1/6/15)
• Approved Baker Ranch project (5/5/15)
• Approve Meritage project (12/15/15)
• Approve Toll Brothers request to add extra floor to homes (9/20/16)

Hamilton got nearly $10,000 from companies with city contracts and voted to

• award street sweeping contract to Athens (5/19/15), who gave him $1,000 (6/8/15) and $1,250 (9/30/15)
• award landscape contract to Marina Landscape (4/19/16), who gave him $500 (9/30/15)
• support OCSD contract (6/7/16) after independent expenditure on his behalf of $10,000 from Police Union
• award one year extension to CR&R contract (2/21/17) after $1,000 (1/31/15) and $1,000 (9/30/15).

Tomorrow we’ll look at Hamilton’s claim that rich people are trying to buy the election and he represents the average guy who needs to take special interest money to compete with the fat cats who are trying to run our City.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Jim Gardner is on the City Council for Lake Forest. You can check him out on LinkedIn and/or Facebook and you can share your thoughts about the City at Lake Forest Town Square on Facebook. His comments are not meant to reflect official City Policy.

Dr. Gardner has office hours every Tuesday from 4 pm to 6 pm at the City Hall. In addition, he holds a Town Hall meeting every quarter. The next meeting will be on May 20 at the Foothill Ranch Public Library.