​Laguna Beach City Council: Where Eight Years Is More Than Enough!

Laguna Beach City Council: Where Eight Years Is More Than Enough!

Whether at LBCC public forums, NGO-hosted interviews or other venues, locals and media should ask candidates if they’d support a 2-term, 8-year limit if elected. It's a binary question, and the inquiry should include similar limits for LBCC-appointed boards, commissions, and committees.

In the case of incumbent George Weiss (if running), he should be asked and be held accountable: If re-elected, would you facilitate placing the topic on the formal agenda with plenty of advance community notice (including PRs & PSAs) to capture maximum public input? Host an open workshop at City Hall?

In the case of Robert (What, me worry?) Whalen, he should just sit this and any other related, Laguna Beach public office race out from now on. Hand him his plaque, his gold-plated pen & pencil set, give him the usual perfunctory fête, and as John Lennon uttered “B is for good-bye.”

Many have dubbed him Laguna’s own “Bobby Bonds” because, damn the torpedoes, every expensive problem can be solved with this kind of "get the moolah now, pay the horrendously high pile of debt later" mechanism.

As in “you and your family’s successors will be infinitely saddled with debt, won't be my problem.”

Low % loans or bonds must still be paid down and off, our existence and image as collateral isn’t as prudent as portrayed. Pushing debt out over 30 years in the kind of massive way via a plethora of multi-million $$$ projects, not singular but collectively, prolongs the pain and guess who’ll be dead and buried by then?

Not just Bob but probably 30% or more of our decidedly aging demographic, who’ll be around to say that was a bad idea or hold the deceased accountable?

Will their progeny even want to live here after the crass monetizing, the commodification and commercialization that have taken place and are being ramped up on his watch? Whose asking if they’ll leave the Laguna which has become unrecognizable from their youth?

A great deal of flight, of native migration has already occurred, and all of the recent gimmicks that leave locals no historical respite have taken their toll. Every weekend crammed with slick events, venues not necessarily to entertain locals but to promote large influxes of outsiders.

Whereas previously locals inhaled around late June and then exhaled after Labor Day, thanks to the “Commerce First, Residents Last” mentality that prevails; that Whalen and his co-pilot, bobble-head Sue ("Yes Bob, No Bob") Kempf openly, unashamedly represent.

Thanks. Thanks a lot. Today, we’re buried in visitors and urban-like traffic, daily not weekend gridlock year-round. Not seasonally. Checked our AQMD stats recently? We’ve gone backwards in spite of our prevailing, off-the-ocean air currents.

Having lived here about 52 years, I can attest to a simple telling fact: Locals laughed about the high season (festivals, weather, etc.) fluctuations, how we became a city but the BANG! Right after Labor Day you could practically fire a round down PCH without hitting anything.

In other words, we went back to being a town, which was a big reason why we stayed. We'd run into each other downtown or at the market and sing Hallelujah! Hey, somebody I know, Eureka!

We’d gotten our town back, we could easily find parking downtown, we could drive around without time consuming traffic jams, we could find a space in front of a friend’s place near the beach to socialize at their digs or on the strands together .

Seldom needed a restaurant reservation either. At night it actually became quiet.

If memory serves, we didn’t even HAVE parking meters to pilfer our pockets and those of our visitors pre-1972. And no, we weren’t held ransom by expensive LB parking permits that should be free or at minimum only a token administrative fee. Robbery, sheer theft.

These meters clog and clutter our sidewalks, in some places inhibit car doors opening, making multiple pedestrian passage well-nigh impossible, unpleasant, like a mosh pit.

Insult to injury, allowing what WERE illegal encroachments and pilloried, ticketed, on our sidewalks we now accommodate commerce (seats, displays, etc.) for a select few, especially restaurants. Sadly, this only makes us look more “Melrose Avenue” than the classic, funky beach vibe Laguna formally epitomized. We’re not being transformed, evolving, we’re in entropy.

We pay enough in other taxes and with a 40% rent/lease residential population, very high monthly sums as well, many only tread water financially. Personally, nearly ½ of my gross income is spent that way whilst advisors declare only 1/3 at most should be a sustainable revenue, living arrangement model. Ditto for mortgages.

As for the “Eight Is Enough” clarion call, more than 2 terms invites and incites, i.e., mobilizes those prone to a Machiavellian mindset: Ethics be damned, acquire power then hold tight to it. Your means justifies your end. Moral goodness or virtue is irrelevant, grasping and holding fast to authority should and do dominate.

Communities like ours display what Ambrose Bierce wrote “Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

There’s no dearth, no lack of applicant abundance when it comes to our LBCC races, nor candidates for those “anointed” boards, commissions, and committees. I use the farmer’s field metaphor: Turn the soil over, refresh and rejuvenate, this can avoid a stagnant societal hierarchy as well.

These lower echelon appointments, these shills, these minions can extend and radiate both vertically and horizontally, agendas NOT in local resident’s best interests; sometimes very subtly, but they can cascade and taint, in some situations irreversibly, indefinitely unless expensive legal remedies are pursued via torts by arguably harmed individuals.

Ask Ms. Christy Miller, she found out the hard way via her time-consuming, pricey confrontation over the redevelopment and conversion of Sweetwater Car Wash. The sheer ineptitude of our staff combined with the outright bias by our Planning Commission gave she and her neighbors no choice. Being right doesn't necessarily translate as a great reward for prolonged, needless battles with your own city. This fiasco has been scandalous, peeled back any mask of Planning Commission neutrality or institutional, in-house overseer capability.

Nonetheless, newbies emerge along with persistent holdovers all of the time, there’d probably be more volunteer candidates if it weren’t for the fact that once seated, prying these career bureaucrats (which, let’s face it, that’s what they are, power attracts the corruptible) out of their dispositive positions is difficult due to whaddya know, whaddya say, those intransigent LBCC members who refuse to give up their apex predator, “Machiavelli Meets & Marries Nietzsche” roles.

I was forwarded some comments posted at Next Door recently, basically an individual I’ve recently come to know (and respect btw). I think the gist was that leaving the same people in power is a sublime form of totalitarianism, albeit it voluntary via the ballot box.

My takeaway was that government can be a type of monopoly, hence prone to corruption. Our LBCC majority, in essence operates and controls OUR marketplace (Laguna), plus many aspects of our local society.

Usually, monopolies refer only to economic advantages in capitalistic domains, but whose to declare this doesn’t apply to coastal gems like ours, the exploitation taking place in plain view?

To the south of us, San Juan Capistrano is going through a similar community identity crisis, inner reflection. It’s no irony that the city manager there was an assistant to ours a few years back. Monkey see, monkey do.

They’re quickly becoming the Knott’s Berry Farm to our Disneyland, as if our heritage and history can be converted into amusement parks. Think of The Promenade on Forest as a highly promoted and publicized, open-to-the-public E-ticket ride, get it?

Blighting, planned or emerging multi-level parking structures all over the place, only to accommodate commerce, are not only being built in SJC but more queued, on the horizon too. Doesn’t THAT sound familiar, Bobby Bonds?

Whalen as Calvin ( Oatmeal Boojie) Coolidge, our Board of Realtors, Visitor's Bureau and Chamber of Commerce as his Greek chorus "The Business of Laguna Is Business." When Laguna raised the red flag for me was about 15 years or so ago, when our former CM posted a graphic of City Hall, in reality a view of his office windows: "Open For Business!"

Where there are winners, there are losers, and implied but not divulged was "Closed For Locals." One has to wonder if ignorance and apathy cloaked the public's eyes when the campaign was launched, why no blowback or outcry?

Though not private industry, politicians and their chosen can and do honor and with their finger to the re-election wind, facilitate and progress their special interest investor’s (donors and electorate base) agendas…..In Laguna’s situation, this is the basis of my “Commerce First, Residents Last” proposition.

There’s no “free market” when our betraying leadership, burrowed in like tics year after year after year, won’t unfasten and stop draining our character, our sense of time and place, the intrinsic (non-material) reasons most locals stayed or moved here in the first place.

The events surrounding the exodus of our former City Manager, once coupled with the publicized “Sword of Damocles” over Whalen’s head regarding evolving developer litigation whose ramifications could take several years to sort out, sprinkle in the sheer arrogance and monarchistic posture of Whalen as condiments, might well lead to a “I’m retiring to spend more time with my family” kind of exit.

Sic transit gloria mundi Pope Bob.