It’s Speedy Delivery Day! UNITE-HERE’s Anti-Hotel Subsidy Referendum Sigs Due. UPDATE: They’re turned in!

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UNITE-HERE leader Ada Briceño … looks nothing like this.  OK, perhaps slightly.  Actually, it’s sort of uncanny. (I had never noticed before!)

It’s August 25, 2016 — and you know what THAT means!

OK, maybe you don’t.  The three hotel subsidies — one to Disney, the other to interests representing Hong Kong-based investors — were finalized by the City on the day of its July 26 meeting.  That started a 30-day clock for anyone who wants to challenge certain Council actions to speedily deliver over 12,000 petitions signatures to the City Clerk turned in to vacate the required ordinances.  Unless the City then cancels them on its own, the question is then put before the voters for their approval.  (Or for their disapproval; I can’t remember which a “yes” vote signifies.  Referenda are complicated that way.)

This post will eventually have updates, right up here, on the status of the delivery of the signed petitions.  Until then, let’s consider the background on the referendum drive, the hotel subsidy policy, and why the Hong Kong investors may have been monstrously set up to fail.

(1) Why Disney is safe from the petition drive

UNITE-HERE — the hotel-and-restaurant workers union led by Ada Briceño (not pictured above, but at right) — was the main force behind the petition as part of a coalition drive.

However, there’s a problem: only the two hotels to be built by the Hong Kong interests have ordinances.  Those ordinances don’t directly involve the subsidies, but they are nevertheless necessary for the new hotels to be built, so the ordinances are the Achilles Heel that can allow voters to spike the subsidies.

This is frustrating to many people — and infuriating to some cynical Orange Juice Blog commenters because it is the Disney hotel subsidy that is the most offensive.  They argue that UNITE-HERE is not going after Disney because UNITE-HERE already has a labor agreement with Disney and what it really wants is “a piece of the action.”  Maybe there’s some kernel of truth there, but I see three problems with that view.  First, the purported “agreement” between UNITE-HERE and Disney that all future hotels on Disney property may not be entirely clear-cut; Disney might be able to weasel around it, but would then suffer labor strife on a Grand Californian scale.

Second, unlike the Building Trades who actually want a certain number of guaranteed jobs for their members — a true “piece of the action,” but to my mind not a particularly sinister one — what the Hotel Employees want is simply an agreement to use the “card check” procedure, which essentially means holding confidential chits from union-supporting employees until enough of them are amassed to trigger union recognition, to be used for the two hotels.  Seeking the right to unionize by a verifiable and confidential procedure strikes me as entirely reasonable when the City is pouring sloshing barrels of subsidies into private hotels.

But to my mind, the big reason that UNITE-HERE won’t challenge the Disney subsidy is that the City has made it impossible to do without a major, major, legal fight against both the City and Disney lawyers.  (Technically, there is a distinction between them.)  As I understand  it — and I’d love to be wrong about this if the City wants to correct me! — the City’s position is that, having passed an ordinance designed to apply to all prospective four-diamond hotels, approving the subsidy for a particular hotel is not a “legislative act,” but essentially a ministerial one, like checking someone’s hand for an ink-stamp before they are allowed back into a concert.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard the City say this so bluntly, but it seems that so long as you plan to build a four-diamond hotel — or at least one with the appropriate “amenities,” as no one can control what diamond-vendor AAA will actually do when rating a given hotel — you now automatically get the additional 70% off of your TOT for twenty, thirty, maybe even forty or fifty years.  (After all, this is surely not the last City Council roster of which Disney will ever own the majority, and future Councils can keep on upping the goodies the way that Disney gets Congress to keep on upping the copyright protection for Mickey Mouse.  “Someday you’ll be in the public domain, my pretty!”)

What that means is that the City has set up a system that will require a huge lawsuit to crack — and that will be defended by a legal army for whom cost is hardly an object.  Others may blame UNITE-HERE for not gearing up for that gargantuan legal battle on top of paying for a professional-level signature gathering campaign, but I sure don’t!  You want to see something like that happen, you get a bunch of people together who are willing to pony up for the lawyers.  (Anyway, there may be an easier legal strategy, which is a discussion for another time.)

That Disney may be legally in the clear does not mean that it is in the clear politically.  Go back and read again what I just wrote above.  The City is saying that voters cannot EVER have any say about another four-star hotel subsidy, EVER.  (Unless the current ordinance changes, that is — but that will require a change in Council personnel, and perhaps overcoming a Disney-sponsored petition drive for a referendum.  There’s A LOT of money at stake here.)  IS THAT CRAZY, OR WHAT?  It now seems clear that, whatever it was that initially prompted the GardenWalk Giveaway, Disney figured out a way that it could be used to its advantage — by making it a secular program that could be available to everyone (with their ability to build four-diamond hotels, that is), providing them a fig leaf to allow their own super-subsidy to be passed.

Which brings us to the Hong Kong investors.  This story originally had a Part 2, dealing with them as victims.  Sadly, I was working off of an old script.  But — Cynthia has come along with a revised and improved version of the hypothesis — which is about to be its own post!  Check it out!

Instead, Part 2 is now a victory yell, courtesy of Jeff LeTourneau’s post on Facebook!

(2) UPDATE 5pm Jeff writes on Facebook:

BREAKING NEWS!!! Unite HERE Local 11 has just submitted over 18,500 signatures (12,600 required) to the Orange County Clerk, placing the recent Brandman, Murray and Kring 300 million dollar corporate giveaway to Wincome Hotels before the voters in November!!! Union members were able to collect these signatures in just a few short weeks due to the widespread disgust with the Council majority’s continued looting of the city’s coffers for personal political gain! CHANGE IS IN THE AIR!!!!

Hey look it’s Martin!

Hey look it’s Linda!