Lake Forest's Government Duping Voters to Protect Councilman Dwight Robinson

The potential censure of Lake Forest city councilman Dwight Robinson is not on the agenda for the City Council meeting Tuesday night.

Residents should be asking Mayor Andrew Hamilton why that’s the case.

Hamilton has the authority to set the agenda with city manager Bob Dunek.

Given that the reason for discussing Robinson’s potential censure has to do with him lying on his candidate statement – which goes out to every registered voter in the city – for an election that is only 49 days away, the omission of this discussion is unfathomable and reprehensible.

In a mere 18 days, those who have registered to mail in their absentee ballots will be able to cast their votes for Robinson or one of the other five candidates, notably including Councilman Adam Nick and recall organizer Leah Basile, who stand in stark contrast to Robinson.

But the earliest this discussion can take place at City Hall is Oct. 4, meaning Hamilton and Dunek will have kept information away from voters for 78 percent of the remaining absentee campaign season.

For those who would rather punch a ballot instead of using the postal service, the 14-day delay represents 29 percent of the campaign season. Such delays are unacceptable when the integrity of the election is at stake.

And that’s assuming the censure discussion even appears on the Oct. 4 agenda. Knowing Hamilton’s depth of deception (creating two copycat Facebook pages, the lie-filled “Lake Forest News,” the smear campaign against Nick, secretly videotaping people and posting on his websites without the victim’s consent or knowledge) which should have gotten him a censure as well, Hamilton may not allow the censure discussion to take place until after the election, sweeping it under the rug until all the votes have been counted.

Fraud and Friends

If Robinson is lying on his candidate statement, he’s essentially committing a fraud on the very people he represents in his elected office. Hamilton and Dunek, by not agendizing the discussion, are complicit in committing a deception on the people of Lake Forest.

Instead of discussing Robinson’s accountability for making outlandish claims that he will “eliminate Mello-Roos in Foothill Ranch, just as we’ve done in Portola Hills” and that his business “here in town … employ(s) nearly 100 Southern Californians” – both of which are patently untrue – the Council will discuss some non-timely items that could easily wait without affecting the integrity of the election process.

These agendized items include allowing a developer to raise the height of its three-story homes 18 inches (submitted by the director of development services), and an annual review of development agreements to determine if they’ve been acting in good faith with the City (submitted by the city manager). Since both are developer issues, and Robinson, Hamilton and Scott Voigts are in the back pockets of developers, both will pass.

Withholding information, or the discussion of information, is not fair to the other candidates, but more importantly, it’s not fair to voters who may not otherwise know the difference between a true statement and a false statement on a government document. These are the same politically uninformed voters targeted by Hamilton, Robinson and Voigts in their racist and deceptive anti-recall campaign that they somehow got away with.

Voters and residents of Lake Forest have a right to know whether a political candidate has been truthful or not, and hear him answer for it; Hamilton and Dunek are preventing that from taking place. Dunek, with two decades on the job, should know better than the mayor, who had more residents sign for his recall in April than voted for him in 2014.

The Censure Precedent

Placing a censure request on the agenda is not without precedent. There was one other censure in the last four years – against Nick. In that instance, based on charges but no evidence of a crime (charges were dropped when the facts came out), Robinson sought a censure at the close of a Council meeting and got consent from Hamilton and Voigts.

It was placed on the very next agenda.

Nick was censured by a 3-2 vote though he didn’t commit a crime (and had not yet received due process from the County) and was accused of saying a racial slur that only Robinson overheard a year earlier as he walked past a parking lot conversation he was not a part of (both witnesses Robinson claimed Nick was talking to publicly denied the slur took place).

So the question is what’s the delay this time? Any answer that includes a full agenda, or a meeting that might extend past 10:30 p.m., is not an acceptable answer, although that’s the kind of answer you’d expect from a city manager who will fall on his sword to protect his job. The Council has gone past midnight before, and frankly, the censure discussion and vote shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes because the evidence is so obvious, but it shouldn’t matter regardless of the time commitment.

Dunek makes more than $300,000 to get things done. Every city employee at the front of Council chambers on Tuesday has a six-figure salary – they’ll stay past midnight if they have to. And, quoting Hamilton, “we’re here to do the City’s business.”

So why isn’t the City’s business getting done?

At this time, seven weeks before the election but less than three weeks before absentee ballots can be mailed in – and half the residents are registered to mail it in – nothing in this town is more important than discussion of whether Dwight Robinson lied on his ballot statement because nothing else in this town has a more immediate and direct impact on the 84,000 residents who are entitled to good and honest government.

Censure Games

It should be a no-brainer in favor of censure, but that’s not the way it will play out.

A censure doesn’t determine whether Robinson has told the truth. It’s nothing more than a public reprimand.
The value of the censure discussion, though, is two-fold: It creates the forum for the information to come to light and be picked up by responsible media, and it gets Hamilton and Voigts on the record with their votes; either they ignore the facts and protect Robinson while risking their political backsides, or they play politics and vote for the censure (no doubt with the approval of Robinson) figuring that Robinson is strong enough to
withstand such an indictment (or that the information will never reach enough people to make a difference) – which is now a greater likelihood because of the delay in the censure vote.

Given that Hamilton and Voigts are likely on their last terms – Voigts got 41 percent fewer votes in 2014 than he did in 2010, and Hamilton got fewer votes in 2014 than any elected councilperson since at least 1998 – they’ll choose the former and protect Robinson with hopes they have two more years together as a Council majority and everyone will eventually forget about it except the few dozen people who attend meetings.

Broader Questions

Lake Forest residents deserve some answers.

Why isn’t Mayor Hamilton protecting the rights of the residents who deserve an answer from Robinson about this obvious deception? And if it's not a deception, why put it off?

Why isn’t the city manager, with all his vast experience, standing up for the entirety of the council instead of just the majority? Doesn't he know better?

Nick’s whole point of getting involved in City government four years ago was to clean up City Hall. Clearly, he still has some work.

Robinson is fond of saying that if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s a duck.

And it’s very clear what this looks like. If it looks like corruption and cronyism within the ranks of City Hall, and it plays out like corruption and cronyism within the ranks of City Hall, then it’s corruption nd cronyism at City Hall.

Again.

About the author: Martin Henderson won several Los Angeles and Orange County press club awards while an editor at Patch in 2012-13.