Irvine may have the most honest election signs in the county this year
First, Evan Chemers deserves some sort of an award for conveying an actual platform on his signs. While Evan apparently doesn’t know about the Irvine Traffic Research and Control Center (ITRAC), I love seeing someone genuinely trying to run a positive campaign on the issues. Good On, Evan!
Next up, Katherine Daigle has done something truly remarkable. She has delivered on a campaign promise before the election. You may recall we here at OJ have started a kerfuffle over elephants that resulted in Ms. Daigle promising to repaint her signs.
By Golly, she has!
Also, Irvine continues to do a better job at sign stealing hijinks than your town. Just in time for the election, AgranAudit.com signs have reappeared all over town.
Tomorrow I’ll prove Irvine has the best eight campaign signs in the county. But enough about Irvine.
What are the best signs in your town this year?
Has anyone in your town kept a campaign promise BEFORE the election? Or made a truly wacky promise?
Does anyone have a good sign stealing story from this year?
Please share in the comments.
Irvine also has the most corrupt signs. The “Irvine Education Team” signs misleadingly imply that Wallin is running on a team with Choi and Lalloway — she most definitely is not and has not endorsed them. Other signs, I understand, misleadingly imply that former mayor Sukhee Kang endorses Choi and Lalloway — Kang was an Agran ally on the council!
Those “Agran Audit” signs bother me, because they suggest that the “Forensic Audit” — which I supported — was viewed from the first as a campaign tool rather than the legitimate investigative tool it was billed as being. Release of the depositions at an electorally opportune time (the timing of which I believe that you have explained away) has been bad enough, but calling it the “Agran Audit” and putting out signs for the election is rotten form. It’s an abuse of the prosecutorial role.
There is no denying the audit is being used politically — but shouldn’t the truth be part of politics?
The auditors themselves have said little; the vast majority of the released materials have been sworn depositions. Whatever Shea and Lalloway’s intent was, Stu Mollrich gave them great cover with his hissy fit over the public records act and threatening to sue to get the depositions released.
If the auditors are only doing a political hatchet job, they are making a mess of it. George Urch is looking clear, while an out-of-towner with near-zero local name recognition, Yehudi Gaffen, seems to have the most to worry about. Bad politics, but perhaps an accurate investigation. Also, with that much material, surely a politically-focused investigator could have trumped-up something against Larry Agran before the election. But that hasn’t happened — indeed, one has to read carefully, deep into three of the depositions, to see that Larry has any possible legal jeopardy.
Whatever the political uses, the audit has already put a useful spotlight on where the management weaknesses where that led to so much being spent on so little.
One can do a lot of damage with well-crafted depositions. Do you doubt that depositions of Choi, Lalloway, and Shea — if a proper pretext (not that the Great Park issue is a pretext) were available fo them — could be doing great damage in the hands of the Agran team right now, even in the absence of legal liability? And you’d be screaming yourself bloody, right?
It’s not ultimately the deposition that bother me. It’s the fact that the City Council majority undertook the prosecution of this matter themselves, deposed their opponents, leaked the information — all of that so far does not clearly cross the line, although it at least approaches it — and then generated a political campaign around it, built around associating Agran’s name with the audit and the audit with findings of corruption et al.
That comes pretty close, if not reaching, a misuse of public funds (as well as the color of law) for political purposes. The “Agran Audit” signs, to me, are either the proof of intent or something that, lacking intent, the Choi/Lalloway team should have condemned as a misuse of their prosecutorial efforts. But, of course, they did not.
As you know, I have been closed off to a finding of wrongdoing. But this really, really, really rubs me the wrong way. I consider it as corrupt as most of what it investigated.