Author: Roger Bloom

The City of Irvine is hosting a pajama party drive-in movie event on Saturday, December 10th at 5:30pm.

Space is limited so registration is required!

A new voice has come to the Irvine City Council, with UCI Professor and environmental activist Kathleen Treseder having been sworn-in during the December 13th post-election organizational meeting. 

The newest member of the City Council recently sat down with Irvine Community News & Views to preview some of the issues and actions she is preparing to tackle in her new role.

On November 7th, a vote to remove Brian Probolsky as CEO of the troubled Orange County Power Authority (OCPA) failed in a closed session of the agency’s board, according to sources at the OCPA and Irvine City Hall.

If OCPA collapses, Irvine taxpayers and electricity ratepayers could be on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in loans, loan guarantees, and other liabilities that OCPA has incurred. In fact, ratepayers in all of the OCPA member cities could be responsible for the more than half-a-billion dollars in energy purchase agreements that OCPA has signed.

In matters of public policy, Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan and her City Council majority — Anthony Kuo, Tammy Kim and Mike Carroll — have a pattern of ignoring or shutting out public input, staff recommendations, and established procedures.

The OC Power Authority (OCPA) was established by Mayor Khan and Councilmembers Carroll and Kuo in 2019 with little review — even though they were committing millions of Irvine taxpayer dollars. OCPA is now the subject of three audits (City of Irvine, County of Orange, California State Auditor) and there is an ongoing FBI investigation.

An Irvine Community News & Views investigation shows that a huge influx of “dark money” — funding an unprecedented deluge of political “hit piece” mailers against Irvine City Councilmember Larry Agran — originated from the two largest developers in Irvine: The Irvine Company and FivePoint.

So far, $355,000 from the developers has been funneled to the Building Industry Association of Southern California PAC (BIA), which then transferred the money to the Los Angeles County Democratic Party. The Party then sent a large portion of the money —  $270,000 — to a PAC (Working Families United), which has close ties to disgraced Democratic campaign consultant Melahat Rafiei and Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan. (Rafiei and Khan are the subjects of an ongoing FBI investigation into corruption in Irvine.)