So he says in today’s mailer.
Larry Agran has been trying to talk about anything but the Great Park this election. He’s tried wrapping himself in Veterans, even though he was a (legal) draft dodger during the Viet Nam war and opposed a cemetery at the Great Park during the eight years he was in control. He’s been running on “slow growth” platform to the point of being openly misleading about his record.
One of the lesser issues in the Irvine Campaign has been the 405 tollways. This is an odd choice, as toll roads are rather popular here. Plenty of folks in Irvine are happy to trade money (which we Irvine residents typically have) for time (which folks with kids typically lack). Indeed, we already have four tollways here in Irvine: the 241, the 261, the 133, and the 73 [1].
Still Larry has used hit mailers and his fake newspaper to claim Jeff Lalloway “voted to build toll lanes on the I-405, which runs through Irvine. ” Note the exploitive grammar. The proposed toll lanes would start at the 55 and go north, which is beyond the Irvine City limit. Also, I haven’t been able to I track down which vote Larry claims Jeff made, which is rather suspicious — I can generally find these kinds of things. But I’m not a close observer of OCTA.
The Jeff Lalloway quote opposing the Toll Lane is from the September 22 OCTA Board meeting, presumably during the agenda item 22 discussion. I can’t find an online transcript of the OCTA meeting, so I can’t assess the context of the quote.
I can’t determined where the truth lies on this one, but given how, um, economical with the truth Larry has been at City Council meetings and in his fake newspaper this year, I am much more inclined to believe Jeff than Larry on this one.
[1] The 73 was in Irvine when it was built, but Irvine ceded some land to Newport Beach for efficiency reasons. Currently the 73 roughly forms the city limit.
[2] The mailer was “Paid for by the Republican Party of Orange County.”
Well, he also voted to put the veterans cemetery in the Great Park, but his supporters are promising opponents that he’ll renege on the agreement — so who knows what he’ll do when the election is over (aside from running for Don Wagner’s seat once Wagner takes Mimi’s seat)?
Well, since we’re talking mailers, Tyler, here’s a tweet from Melissa Fox about the claim from the Choi/Lalloway/Schott team they they’ve been endorsed by former Mayor Sukhee Kang:
That disturbs me. Do you have any real argument to make that — even if one votes for Lalloway — the City Council would be better with the addition of Schott than it would with the addition of Fox? Fox has been done a disservice by being dragged into a fight that isn’t hers, but I think that she’s shown that she’d be much more of an asset to the Council than the Tea Partier Schott. What’s your sense of things?
I have not seen the Kang mailer, so I’m not about to get into a twitter-storm over this.
Melissa’s effectiveness as a city councilperson depends heavily on a detail not yet known: Larry Agran’s role in Irvine politics after Nov 4th.
If Melissa becomes Larry’s third vote, then yes, Melissa will be a *terrible* person to have on the council. Larry paid for her campaign; she’ll have no independence.
If Larry retires from Irvine politics next Wednesday, it all looks different. Replacing Larry with Melissa would be a *huge* improvement over the current situation, for example.
It all depends….
This doesn’t sound right at all. I had high hopes for Lalloway on the OCTA Board, but what I remember during the first year was realizing we couldn’t count on him to oppose tolls. The staunch opponents have been only the four members from the immediately affected area (which is very short-sighted of the others) – that’s Moorlach, Harper, Nguyen [usually] and Miller – along with my good friend Tom Tait from Anaheim.
There actually has not been a vote, during the almost-two years Jeff’s been on the Board, on whether or not OCTA would toll the 405 (aka “Alternative 3.”) So he can truthfully say he “never voted to toll the 405.” But I could never tell he was AGAINST it; I got the opposite impression.
At the meetings I was at he was far from a “vocal opponent,” more an apologist for tolls. All these politicians have their favorite little catchphrases – his has been that tolls are NOT a TAX, but instead a “USER FEE.” And he made it very clear that User Fees are something he finds acceptable, and amenable to his particular “conservative” philosophy. He even brought up his institution of “user fees” for the Great Park Balloon as something he was proud of.
I haven’t been paying as close attention to this issue as I used to; it’s all soiled now with Caltrans coming in and insisting they’re going to do what public outcry wouldn’t allow OCTA to do. So I called up Diana Lee Carey who doesn’t miss a thing. She says that SPITZER had a vote, LAST MONTH, just for OCTA Board members to go on the record and say whether or not they are “philosophically” opposed to putting tolls on our freeways. And she is PRETTY sure that Jeff did NOT side with Todd on that, against tolls. We are double-checking now, with Director Gary Miller.
We know that Todd has a jihad against Agran, that first meeting of the new council was unforgettable! http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2013/01/so-apparently-it-was-the-irvine-great-park-all-along-who-knew/ But it’s Fox I care more about, and she’s been using Jeff’s weakness on the tolls issue against him. I’m gonna get to the bottom of this this weekend for sure, and I have more to say about the desperation of the Lalloway-Choi campaign against Melissa.
At least it’s heartening to see that being a toll-troll is now considered a definite political loser. But I’m not sure we can let Jeff run away from his pro-toll comments. I’ll be back…
It was Sept 22. Todd had a motion which failed, that would have put the OCTA Board on record formally opposing tolls or anything like Alt 3. That motion was opposed by LALLOWAY, Donchak, Jones, Al Murray, Tim Shaw, and the two useless “public members.” Pulido certainly would have opposed it too, but he had scurried off early to attend to some other crookedness. And JANET to her discredit could have caused the measure to pass, but she was also otherwise engaged – probably with her Senate campaign.
I’ve got the PDF of the meeting now, and lots of other details, this will be its own story by tomorrow. If Jeff has been a “vocal opponent” of toll lanes on the 405, it must have been afterhours in a bar somewhere where nobody was paying attention or nobody remembers. What a good friend Todd is though, to claim you supported his measure when you really didn’t – as long as it hurts an enemy of Todd!
Supervisor Spitzer chided the OCTA Board for abdicating their powers to Caltrans. He proposed that the Board pass a ‘policy statement’ against toll lanes. Caltrans immediately said that such a ‘policy statement’ would delay the project, and Lalloway voted with Caltrans against the ‘policy statement’. For the record, the current Board has never voted on toll lanes, only in favor of Alt. 1. The Corridor Cities requested that the savings from alterations we proposed be applied to an additional free lane. Mr. Lalloway has consistently spoken against that proposal.
http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2014/11/lalloway-choi-lies-405-toll-lanes-veterans-cemetery-and-so-much-more/
That is too rich and ironic, Todd Spitzer going after Larry Agran. Back in 2002 during the Great Park campaign, they were two peas in a pod. He has the phony outrage against the lack of park progress because it is where the political winds blow. Here is a quote from a NY Times article.
”What we all campaigned for was to have a Great Park,” Mr. Spitzer said. ”But it’s not going to be a great big park. The economic developments are going to drive how much open space there will be. The land use will be driven by the economics.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/01/us/california-officials-wrangle-over-plans-for-great-park.html