.
.
.
Goodness gracious — what a mess!
Yorba Linda — your politics are a mess and the rest of us don’t really want to talk about it. So this is your own little safe space in which to discuss everything you’d like about your Council races and your Water Board races and your Water Board recalls and whatever else. Here’s where we stand, tentatively:
- Development is generally not good if you want less traffic
- But if you want development, a fair portion of it has to be for low-income residents
- You use too much water
- When you cut water usage, the fixed costs (for infrastructure and the like) remain the same, so your rates may go up to cover them when income from water bills don’t
- Your Water Board members didn’t create that economic law. When God created the universe, God did so in a way that it would just happen that way.
- Be adults. And good luck!
About Greg Diamond
Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that.
Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too.
He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.)
His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)
As a resident of Yorba Linda, I received a postcard yesterday in our mail (https://imgur.com/a/VsSJnHB) for the Yorba Linda Housing Element Update. More information is available here: yllocalcontrol.com
I vaguely remember voting about this in one of the recent elections. It was complicated, and Greg, at the end, kind of left us to our own devices. LOL 😉
As this issue continues, I hope Greg will have time to stay a bit apprised of this further because I’m still interested in his opinions. Thank you.
I think my stance on local control regarding Measure Z in the past election — that would have been expressed in my election post, not this one — was that YL should go along with the low-cost housing requirements the state demanded, but that they probably wouldn’t, and that would probably leave them worse off than if they did, and that I would laugh at the people who had been pushing for bad policies when that happened, but that I would feel bad for the good people who were getting snookered or whose fates were bound to the snookered and the snookerers.
You seem to be one of the ones who were in the right — and I’m sorry for you. It looks like the low-cost housing will now be implemented by the Committee of 17 — and I expect that it will be nearest YL’s small-but-thriving Black community (as I recall it from years ago) so as not to be within the sight of the lighter denizens of the Land of Gracious Living.
We invite you to write your own piece about this. (Using a pseudonym is fine so long as it’s not defamatory.) Vern and I may have our opinions, but we cover the whole county and there’s no good substitute for the information you get when you live in the place where something is happening. Good luck with all this!