Larry Agran is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaign mailers that trash development plans he spent years putting in place.
(photo credit: OC Weekly)
Politicians regularly run away from their record. Larry Agran is no exception, needing to talk about anything but “where did the Great Park’s $230 million go?” He has tried a variety of issues including a disastrous attempt to adopt a sister city in Viet Nam. However he has made attacking the very growth plans he created the centerpiece of his campaign.
Consider Larry’s Sept. 2 eight-page campaign weekly campaign mailer (yes — Larry mails an eight-page faux newspaper to Irvine voters every week) that highlights the current “reckless” growth:
According to the City’s current Strategic Business Plan, the number of homes and apartments in Irvine will increase by 25 percent in the next decade, and could go even higher.
Who created this breakneck growth? Larry Agran, Sukhee Kang, and Beth Krom, as shown on page two of the Business Plan. Larry and Sukhee changed the master plan for the Irvine Business Complex to allow thousands of new for high-rise residential housing units, even though doing so honked off neighboring cities.
This raises an interesting question: Who is paying for the hundreds of thousands of dollars for these slate mailers? Historically, Irvine Business Complex developers helped underwrite Agran’s mailers. Do they still? If so, is Larry sincere about “slowing” the growth? Alternatively, is Larry writing checks to his own campaign again? If so, how is a man in his fourth decade of public service able to so lavishly fund a city council campaign?
As a wise man once said, “Follow the money…”
For the record, Tyler — it would probably be appropriate as we near Election Day for you to confirm my understanding about your role: that you’re just a dedicated volunteer and are not getting paid, directly or indirectly, by anyone to write about Irvine politics.
I’m not getting paid directly or indirectly for my position, which is to disagree with you in part.
I’ll presume that you’re right that the former majority changed the Business Plan to allow more high-rise residential housing units — which I’d argue is a hell of a lot better than cramming almost 10,000 new homes with big lawns into what was supposed to be the Great Park. But let’s bear in mind: they did so prior to the current Council’s making their astounding Insta-Deal with Five Point for that massive single-family-mansion deal.
They didn’t — arguably couldn’t — expect that something would come along later that would make their (I’m betting reasonable) decision on those high-rises contribute to what will be a much bigger problem for Irvine down the road. You’re criticizing them for a far smaller contribution to the problem, in ignorance of what would come later, while implicitly rooting for the people that made the far larger contribution to the problem with full knowledge about what had been done in the previous year.
As for who’s paying for what — have you looked at the campaign finance info? Wait, I believe that you recently wrote that you did. So do you think that it’s going to fail to tell the story or something? Maybe you do — we still don’t know who funded the pro-Choi onslaught of fliers in 2012 — about which you don’t seem to be exercised.
Nice change of topic, Greg.
You didn’t dispute any claim about the present conditions. Instead you impugned my motivations and talked about possible future impacts.
Larry’s campaign mailers discuss the current conditions, which Larry spent years (and millions of campaign dollars) creating.
The IBC entitlement process was a decade long effort, so I used a single example to illustrate my point. The usual number bandied about here in Irvine is that the IBC entitlement and the Spectrum re-entitlement added 40,000 units.
Again: 40,000 units.
Larry and his developer supporters knew exactly what they were doing: That’s why Newport and Tustin each sued Irvine. They knew the traffic impact on Jamboree and it’s associated streets would be crushing. It’s in the reports going back to 2001.
The “point man” for all this was Sukhee Kang. I can produce dozens upon dozens of documents to satisfy your lawyerly soul, but that would make for a lot of boring blog posts. Larry and his friend pushed HARD to increase density along Jamboree and in the Spectrum. It’s what begot the disaster that is the iShuttle, for example ( I can explain that, too, but I doubt your partisan soul wants that discussed here, either).
As for Choi’s $200,000 of outside support? First, it’s not much of a mystery. It was almost certainly Lennar. Yet it was still less than a third of what the Agran coalition spent. Heck, it’s less than half of the $468,000 Larry personally loaned his campaign! Beyond that odd loan, Larry benefitted from large chunk of Walkie Ray money laundered through the Union and substantial support from the Strader’s Starpoint Ventures (or whatever it’s called currently). And no one knows where the $20 million the Great Park gave to Forde and Mollrich over the years went — F&M claims to have no records.
Currently, the Agran side regular outspends the Shea side at least three-to-one, and in some years almost ten-to-one. I believe in the last election, Larry spent $29 per vote ( I can track that down, too, if you care). That loan by itself was nearly $15 per vote.
But enough of that for one day.
You completely mis-understand my viewpoint.
I am not a partisan Republican. You may recall I was the pro-choice in-house liberal at Cunningham’s old Red County blog. Indeed, I posted a prescient post entitled “Why Republicans should wish Prop 8 would go away”
The problem with Larry isn’t corruption. Read the Great Park Depositions. I have. Nothing in the Great Park depositions suggest any money kicked back to Larry.
However, the incontrovertible fact at this point is that Larry, despite being a wizard at fundraising, is a terrible manager. Boy howdy, are there stories.
..and THAT’s my beef with Mr. Agran.
Understood. I didn’t return to OC (where I was raised) until the end of 2006, so I missed a lot of the early history. And I don’t think that I ever bothered to read Red County. I wasn’t much on local blogs until I hooked onto the Brown campaign in the summer of 2010.
I would support Agran in this election unless it turned out that he got kickbacks or otherwise acted criminally — and I see no indication that he did. I think that the situation with Forde & Mollrich is self-evidently so disturbing that I wouldn’t get in the way of your attempts to explain it — but that won’t stop me from putting up a counter argument. The argument about his being a bad manager is obvious from the transcripts, but I think that that is mitigated by the facts that (1) in my opinion the man really IS a public-spirited visionary — and he might have accomplished more were he not beset upon by such self-serving “friends,” and (2) whatever he was prior to 22 months ago, he’s now a chastened version of it.
I’ll expand on that last point. That Agran worked so hard and so well on the Veterans Cemetery, which at least gives some portion of respect to his vision of the Great Park as an Important Place to me shows of what we could expect from an Agran-driven Council (to the extent that that’s what we’d get; Melissa Fox, for one, is not a quiet follower and has many good ideas of her own.) Seriously, the project simply would not have happened if either Agran, Sharon Quirk-Silva, or OCVMP’s Bill Cook had been replaced with someone of only average talent and drive — and while I don’t know much about your 40,000 units along the freeway, I was in a great position to witness and assess that. Whatever damage people claim was done by Agran is simply no longer possible; after those depositions, “the band’s not going to reunite” even if it had the opportunity.
I credit Agran with much of the victory (if one considers it that) of keeping out the airport; and he’s paid the price for paying the price demanded by his consultants. Meanwhile, Choi & Company simply, in my view, simply sold out the city’s interests for far less than they could and should have gotten. So, in comparative terms, I favor Agran there as well.
“I would support Agran in this election unless it turned out that he got kickbacks or otherwise acted criminally — and I see no indication that he did.”
You, the eternally, infernally pedantic talk machine who can spit out endless prose about the most throwaway of sins (see, oh, any number or posts today about Dan the Chimp) can muster nothing but equivocation for what is, at the very least, gross and unapologetic incompetence on a once in a generation scale. Hilarious.
Vern – and hell, Cynthia – should kick you in the (digital, virtual) nuts for thinking, let alone typing, something so stupid.
Wait, let me get out my checklist.
Insult? Check.
Failure to understand other article? Check.
Florid overreach? Check.
Closing insult? Check. You hit all the compulsories.
I’ll just focus on the florid overreach for now.
“nothing but equivocation for what is, at the very least, gross and unapologetic incompetence on a once in a generation scale”
At the very least, incompetence on a once in a generation scale?
You seem to derive some special sort of pleasure from hyperbole. Really — that the LEAST it is, and it’s actually more like “twice a century” incompetence or “once a century” or “seven times per millennium”?
What you come off as — probably your greatest horror — is cossetted and blinking newborn baby-eyed ignorance of the world around you.
Let’s do the math. Yes, Forde & Mollrich originally charged $50,000 per month, but let’s say it was $100,000 all the time through, and let’s call the time period 15 years, though it isn’t. That’s $1.2 million per year on this contract for 15 years, and IF THEY DID NOTHING then that’s $18 million down the rabbit hole. Go ahead and double that, triple it — and pretend that it was completely, 100% wasted and never meant to do any good in the first place. It’s still not a “once a generation” error; it’s closer to “once a year.”
Curt Pringle is laughing at you. On the Pringle “Gobbling up Public Funds for Private Gain” Richter-Like Scale, $18 million wasted is maybe a 2.6 – 2.7 tops. AT MY DESK RIGHT NOW, I’m looking at documents about City of Anaheim Staff simply FORGETTING to tell the Council that the price tag on some bonds was $110 million more than admitted — a number that itself was $150 million more than described to the public.
And $200 MM for the ARTIC train station, for a train that may not even come to exist. If Agran were TRYING to rip off the public, THAT is where he was a piker. But you’re goggling at it like you’ve never seen a bad public works deal before. (Or maybe your “once in a generation” figure applies to “acts by Larry Agran.”)
Here’s where we disagree (and some places where I disagree with Agran): and I’ll be specific, because I get the sense that it makes you uncomfortable.
(1) Was Agran really worried about delays in building the Great Park?
He and I disagree here. He seems to want people to believe that he wanted to go as fast as possible. I doubt that. I think that most important thing to him and his supporters about the “Great Park” is that it was the “Great, Not an Airport!” And he achieved this.
If it took a long time to build, that was largely due to delays in remediation (perhaps not well planned for, perhaps that didn’t matter) and, as the man says, the economic collapse plus the end of redevelopment. EVEN SO — what Irvine was punished with was … nothing much. Open land. A de facto nature preserve, of the sort that we up north have tried to keep with the West Coyote Hills. A small public square that wasn’t doing anyone great good or harm; something not that different, except in terrain, from the hangars in Tustin. It’s not like huge bond payments were looming over this. It just wasn’t going anywhere. Irvine was not — compared to what will be coming now that Choi and his people got their hooks into it — being particularly harmed by the lack of progress. It was most a nagging aggravation — and a good campaign issue, of course!
The main problem, it appears, was the Forde & Mollrich contract. That was not a TOTAL waste, but apparently (and foreseeably) way overpriced in a way that seems like corruption if intentional but merely negligence if not. Agran kept control close at hand, which may seem like a character defect — but not so obviously one if he was concerned about everyone wanting a piece of the pie. Without a well-connected central actor like Forde & Mollrich, it’s not clear that Irvine would have saved that much over what happened, because the PR giant also did defend its domain. (Maybe that’s what Agran wanted. I’m sure he wouldn’t say so.) Ten or fifteen years from now, I expect that people will wish that the land had just lay mostly fallow rather than getting the treatment that Emile Haddad is going to give it. Do you even think I’m wrong?
(2) Was he trying to do some good?
If he was, and if there was reason behind what he was doing, then the Great Park may be classified as a “noble failure” rather than a once-in-a-generation catastrophe. (Every time I write that, I think of what an innocent babe you seem to be.) So, was he trying to do some serious good? I think OBVIOUSLY HE WAS. Call it a vanity effort if you must, but Agran’s legacy was tied to Irvine and making Irvine something spectacular, as his plans called for, would have served his ego by well-serving the city. So I don’t begrudge his going for something Great. And I think that in retrospect his plans will look better than what the current Council gets with their blitzkrieg signing of a contract with Five Point.
(3) Should he have done a better job of supervision? I’d say so! But hiring a big Power Republican and Business Democrat firm like Forde & Mollrich’s may simply have been the price that OC’s corrupt political required for the deal to have a chance to work. That’s not uncommon. If Agran underestimated how badly Forde & Mollrich would take advantage of it — well, that’s not uncommon either, in a County where the main prosecutor is so well-connected and so generally inert towards addressing white-collar crime. The gall shown by his contractee — claiming not to have internal billing records — tells you the sort of corruption that the system tolerated. If, as I think, he is a basically honest man — how is he supposed to operate in such a system?
That’s enough for now. Give me something to argue with that isn’t built of generalities. Study Tyler’s work — he’s doing a good job — if you need to, but stop sounding like you’re sipping on a brandy and bellowing vague eruptions of discontent and contempt. If your identity were known, that sort of thing would be embarrassing to you.
“blah blah blah”
I’m paraphrasing.
Hyperbole? Project much? Once in a generation perhaps understates the magnitude of the lost, and probably last, opportunity to do something so novel and on such a grand scale. Agran’s failure – and that too is an understatement – has consequences that go so far beyond the sheer waste of dollars. When’s the last time anything so big and so contrary to the usual developer industrial complex model succeeded in OC, Mile Square Park?
Oh, and Coyote Hills that “you” have been trying to save? I wasn’t on FFFF for nothing, it’s because I’m from Fullerton. “You” have done exactly nothing. And then there’s Jan Flory who you shilled for, who was pro Measure W and nearly as worthless re: Coyote Hills as anyone on the Kiger-Whitaker-whatever slate.
But you’re right, poor Larry, with his years of leadership experience and an econ degree from Berkeley who was played by all those mean consultants. But hey, at worst it was “merely negligence”. Maybe Larry can put that on his yard signs.
Our friends in common tell me that you are not a cranky idiot who spends his time at the keyboard sniping at people who actually try to do something in politics or in life beyond kvetching — but damned if I could prove it by your writing here.
I completely agree — as, I expect, would Agran — that Mile Square Park was a substantially smaller model of what should have happened with the Great Park. While I moved to Huntington Beach, about 5 miles away, the year that it was opened, I don’t have much sense of exactly how the City and/or County pols pulled off converting the auxiliary military airfield there to its present use — but based on my memories of that area at that time I can say that it would have been FAR easier than converting the Great Park area to such use 30 and more years later, because at the time that area of the coastal plain was FULL of open space that was being converted into housing tracts like the one where I was raised. The idea of creating a Regional Park to make the area more attractive to home buyers, who were competing with many other areas as white families fled school busing in LA, would presumably have been a fairly easy sell. And let’s bear in mind that Mile Square also contains three golf courses, and so far as I can tell within the last 25 years the only significant development has been an executive golf course (for which there is always an influential constituency.)
So contrast that three-foot putt with the approach shot from the rough that Agran had to attempt to make par. Did he fail to succeed? Largely — though I think he’d argue otherwise — but the task was orders of magnitude more difficult. Land in that part of Irvine is more scarce and more lucrative that that in Fountain Valley at the end of the Roaring ’60s. Orange County was turning more Democratic at the time and its leadership was more heterodox. And there wasn’t the same rush at the outset, because nobody was trying to build a freaking international airport there. So he made alliances, in some cases with some not very nice or generous people, to (1) stop the airport and (2) create a plan — maybe in part a crackpot plan, or maybe only cracked in some aspects that could have been revised — to do something truly grand there. And if he felt that he had to maintain an unusual degree of personal control, it’s because the water around him was filled with sharks who wanted to sell out the public interests — which is exactly what happened within a year of the new management taking over.
Now as for Coyote Hills — and here I must apologize for the need to call you a dumbshit. What I wrote was this:
Seriously — are you just stupid or are you intentionally distorting what I wrote? I was not asserting that I personally played a significant role in saving the West Coyote Hills — although I did speak and write in support of its preservation and “citizen-lobbied” a bit. I was saying that PEOPLE UP HERE GENERALLY did that. So your “Oh, and Coyote Hills that “you” have been trying to save?” challenge is just nuts, unless you’re using the plural “you.” And I did argue, at Democratic meetings, against the position of the old guard in Fullerton that what Chevron was offering was the best deal that could ever be had, which I know was convincing to some Democrats in the region (because they came up and talked to me.) But I’m still not claiming that that was a “significant role” — which, on a scale of 0 to 1, I guess might well round down to 0. But you would have no idea about that, right?
My problem with Agran — and it’s not a serious character flaw, just his being human — is that he hoped that he’d be able to string out not building much of anything in the Park indefinitely while continuing to stick the public with a running tab. That wasn’t going to work forever — and I wish that he’d have been quicker to develop a decent “Plan B” while he still could. But the likelihood is that no one who was as or even more interested in bringing something significant to Irvine could have played that hand much better. We live in a dirty county, and part of the demand on someone who wants to do something big and worthwhile is that some “connected” people are going to get their share. Again, I don’t know who you are, but you seem likely to live in a blissful land where you can simply condemn all compromises (like bringing in the OCDA’s friends Forde & Mollrich) out of hand. But — as Vern assures me that you’re not Tony Bushala himself — my guess is that you’ve never accomplished anything significant in public affairs in your whole life — so you’re a poor one to judge. I could be wrong about you, sure — but if so that’s the price of your own cowardice.
http://www.fullertonsfuture.org/2013/county-wants-to-build-homeless-shelter-on-state-college/#comment-144600
I’m supportive when you do something worthwhile, but you’re 5% crusader and 95% Kardashian. The GD-centric narrative which characterizes your voluminous body of work, where you reflexively – sometimes subtly, sometimes not – insert yourself into the subject, or feign knowledge about or involvement with something or someone being discussed. That’s where the “you” and Coyote Hills comes from. I know the we of Coyote Hills. It isn’t everyone in north OC, it isn’t you, and it isn’t the nominally Democratic do-nothings (or worse) who are the beneficiaries of your flackery.
And on Mile Square Park, here’s a primer. It’s the kind of thing one would really want to read before mentioning the ‘easy sell’ – but of course the pretense of having some insight into [insert whatever is at hand] is precisely part of the GD MO we’re talking about. Hilariously, this is on Voice of OC. Heard of it?
http://www.voiceofoc.org/countywide/county_government/article_db467438-956e-11e0-8e8d-001cc4c002e0.html
As an aside, Dave Baker – funny story about that – but nevermind, because unlike someone I don’t try to make it about me.
Your first link leads to this discussion, which — what the hell, given its pertinence — I’ll reproduce in full. Ladies and gentlemen who somehow missed it, behold the wonder that was FFFF. Here (in the wake of 1-1/2 years of advocacy and more on behalf of Kelly Thomas) some of its most prolific members addressed the proposal to build a homeless shelter in Fullerton; the exchange in #13-14 seems to be what caught nipsey interest:
I both miss FFFF and I don’t miss it. Regardless, this is the moment when I think that part of the mask came off.
Thanks for the link to OC Park History Is a Tale of Two Counties, nipsey. It’s a very informative article, one that I hope more people will read.
I find it hard to answer your character attacks in the abstract. On Coyote Hills, I alienated the most powerful North OC Democrats in the generation above mine by disturbing what were otherwise seamless presentations, in public and in private areas such as campaign offices, about why we had to live with the Coyote Hills deal that Chevron wanted. This wasn’t me being a “profile in courage,” but it did come at a cost if I was concerned about political advancement. You may say “it didn’t”; you’re simply wrong. You may say “so what”; you may be right. But you don’t seem to have any actual basis to judge whether, when I claim to have been involved in a given political effort, I actually was. You just don’t like the idea that I’d say that I had been — apparently regardless of whether it was true.
All I can say is that you can collect what you consider my self-aggrandizing statements and I’ll explain (with evidence where permissible) what it is I did with them. I do things like that for two reasons: (1) because I feel a moral obligation to get involved where I can, and (2) because I want to inspire others to do the same — by showing that it can be done and that the consequences they may fear from doing so are far less dire than they expect.
If you can find places where I’ve exaggerated my participation, I’ll acknowledge them and apologize. I doubt that you can — and where you think you can, it’s probably because, as above, you have misinterpreted what I’d said.
We were talking about Coyote Hills: I give primary credit for the West Coyote Hills victory primarily to the voters of Fullerton, who certainly played the literally decisive role, and to Gus Ayer and those around him — including the Green Party contingent (to which I suspect you may belong) — without which the victory would have been impossible. Gus (and Vern) aside, that’s a North Orange County group. That’s all I meant in drawing the analogy to the undeveloped Great Park.
That you seem to think that my allegedly being inappropriately self-aggrandizing — “5% crusader and 95% Kardashian” is a great line, but even coming close to believing it marks you as an idiot — is one of the worst sins around says a whole lot about you and not much about me. It makes sense if you yourself are afraid to pay a price for your political convictions, which might be why you seem most comfortable traveling in the safety of a pack.
Let me be blunt: I suffer (monetarily and politically) for my convictions all of the time — and while I might turn down the intensity for each I wouldn’t really have it any other way. The people in County politics whom I most respect — Vern and Cynthia being examples, and I won’t embarrass or taint others by naming them — are people who are willing to endure more pain and hardship and forego more material success because they believe in things and wade into fights rather than slinking away to carp from the sidelines. You seem to not think that such people really exist — or it bothers you that they do.
The reason that I’m so interested in your identity, I suppose, may be because I wonder if you have ever actually risked anything — a good portion of your wealth, your social standing, your comfort — to publicly support an unpopular cause or oppose a treacherous cause in a way that might threaten your comfortable OC life. You’re an educated man and a hell of a writer, but if you haven’t then you’re a selfish waste of flesh and your criticism is self-serving and boring.
Have a good weekend.
What a bunch of self-indulgent claptrap.
One can’t improve on perfection, so I quote myself. Again:
“Using your real name is not a badge of honor, it’s your shtick.”
This is just more GD the Selfless. For a self-described government accountability attorney who touts his anti corruption work, you sure whine a lot about offending pols by, you know, even just saying something. And yes, that falls squarely into the “so what” zone, and also the ‘how the hell do you expect to demand accountability without pissing people off by holding them accountable’ zone.
One must observe – to bring this full circle – the whole Agran apologism sure seems awfully light re: accountability.
If you got a job with the FBI you’d complain that it hindered your career opportunities with the mafia. It’s a noble enough career choice, but it isn’t selflessness, let alone martyrdom. You don’t get a medal for every path you choose not to take. Because, I mean, where would you put them all.
If you want to be a pol, be one. If you want to hold people in government accountable, and even make a career out of it, do that.
I am totally fine with the disclosure request. Here goes:
I am not a lawyer – is that a clear enough disclosure? or do you need more? I appreciate having blogging privileges here and I appreciate that we need to keep this “clean.”
Nope. That’s partly to fend off people who will say that OJB is funding the Choi group’s campaign.
Actually, looking at your recent Gail Eastman post, I do need more disclosure.
“I have not been compensated, I am not currently compensated , nor do I anticipate ever being compensated, monetarily or by other means, by any political campaign”
Don’t want anyone to think I’m being “Clintonesque” with the verb tenses.
Great piece Tyler. In fact we got confirmation today from the first anti Agran mailer to hit Irvine that Larry did indeed pay for his fake newspapers out of his own pocket.
http://www.powderbluereport.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-anti-agran-mail-arrives-in-irvine.html