Author: ICNV Staff

Just before midnight during the October 26th City Council meeting, Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan and her Council majority — Tammy Kim, Mike Carroll and Anthony Kuo — voted to rescind the City’s “Sunshine Ordinance,” which requires City Council meeting agendas to be made available to the public 12 days prior to Council meetings.

Rescinding a City ordinance requires two readings, so the item was supposed to receive its final vote at the November 9th City Council meeting. In a surprising turn of events, Irvine residents were apparently able to stop Khan, Kim, Kuo and Carroll from taking that second vote.

Irvine City Councilmember Larry Agran submitted a Memo to his Council colleagues, requesting that his resolution on clean energy be added to the next Council meeting. No one agreed to sign on to Agran’s request. Because of the Mayor’s “Rule of Two,” Agran’s resolution was not added to the agenda.

Earlier this year, the Council adopted an aspirational resolution, supporting the City’s commitment to reaching carbon neutrality by 2030. It’s unclear why the same Councilmembers now refuse to even discuss Agran’s resolution to help meet the City’s goal.

In 2020, the previous City Council agreed to fund the Orange County Power Authority (OCPA) through 2022. So far, the City has advanced $7.5 million of Irvine taxpayer money to the Power Authority, with no oversight by the current Council.

Last week, Councilmember Larry Agran stated: “I have been on this Council since December of last year. Here we are nearly a year later and because of the ‘Rule of Two,’ I can’t even get a presentation from the OCPA to determine if the City should be a part of this entity or if we are being put at grave financial risk.”

Climate scientists say that we must achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, if we are to avoid an irreversible ecological tipping point. That is 20 years earlier than previous estimates, which means we must immediately accelerate our efforts.

Thanks to the commitment of more than 200 Irvine residents who have volunteered to be Cool Block leaders, our City joins two others (Los Angeles and Petaluma) in receiving a $1 million grant from the Empowerment Institute to help fund a climate “moonshot strategy.”