For years, giant land developer FivePoint has plotted and schemed in an effort to acquire the City-owned 125-acre site (“ARDA”) on the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in the Great Park that had been designed and approved for a State-built and State-operated Veterans Memorial Park & Cemetery. FivePoint wants to build massive office, commercial and industrial projects on the ARDA site — projected to put an additional 10,000 cars and trucks onto Irvine streets every day.
In 2017-2018, Irvine residents organized the “Build the Great Park Veterans Cemetery” citizens’ committee to stop a FivePoint-funded ballot measure that would have handed FivePoint the ARDA site. To push their ballot measure through, FivePoint established and bankrolled a PAC (“VALOR”) with an initial money-drop of $600,000! VALOR was used as FivePoint’s tool for spreading lies and attacking the citizens’ committee.
In June 2018, a 63.7% majority of Irvine voters rejected the FivePoint-VALOR campaign of lies and deception, defeating the developer-funded ballot measure scheme (Measure B).
Mayor Christina Shea (who has taken more than $100,000 in dark money campaign support from FivePoint) has completely ignored the results of the 2018 election. Shea has become a shill for FivePoint’s massive development plans and was even caught on video last year telling Great Park homeowners that she had come up with an alternative “Golf Course” site as a “diversion tactic” to stop the State from building the Veterans Memorial Park & Cemetery at the “ARDA” site. (Click here to watch the video.)
For months now, the all-volunteer team at the “Build the Great Park Veterans Cemetery” committee has worked tirelessly to gather the 15,000 signatures necessary to qualify their own ballot initiative — a citizens’ initiative that would designate the ARDA site as the once-and-for-all citizens’ choice for the Veterans Cemetery so that the State can begin construction this year.
Now that the citizens’ committee is completing the signature-gathering process, FivePoint has launched a new series of TV commercials — costing hundreds of thousands of dollars — again using FivePoint’s VALOR PAC and other dark money committees in a desperate attempt to crush the citizens’ initiative effort.
Irvine Community News & Views warns our readers to beware of these deceptive FivePoint-VALOR ads.
If you have not already signed the “Build the Great Park Veterans Cemetery” initiative petition, do so and encourage your friends and neighbors to join you.
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