Former Irvine Mayor Larry Agran — who has been working since 2014 to ensure the City follows through with its promise to build the Veterans Memorial Park & Cemetery on the 125-acre ARDA site at the Great Park — filed an initiative petition with the Irvine City Clerk on August 12th.
The initiative would allow Irvine voters to, once and for all, decide the fate of the ARDA site. If the initiative qualifies for the ballot and is passed by Irvine voters, it will designate and re-zone the 125-acre ARDA site for one use and one use only — a State-built and State-operated Veterans Memorial Park & Cemetery.
For years, Mayor Christina Shea has worked with billion-dollar developer FivePoint to cancel the planned-and-approved Veterans Cemetery on the ARDA site and, instead, replace it with massive FivePoint development that would bring an estimated 10,000 added daily cars and trucks to the ARDA site and to north Irvine streets and neighborhoods. (FivePoint has bankrolled Shea’s campaigns with hundreds of thousands of dollars in dark money.)
The Shea-FivePoint scheme — which became Measure B — was overwhelmingly rejected by Irvine voters, 63% to 37%, in an historic ballot referendum last year.
The Mayor was recently caught on video at a meeting of homeowners, revealing her latest scheme to defeat the Veterans Cemetery. Shea told the group that she was orchestrating a Council vote to cancel the State’s plan to build the Veterans Cemetery on the ARDA site, while putting up a completely different site (as a “diversion tactic”) and further revealing that she wants to give a “99-year lease” of the ARDA site to a commercial developer, presumably FivePoint.
To learn more about Shea’s backroom deals with developer FivePoint and comments from the community regarding the Mayor’s handling of the Veterans Cemetery issue, click here.
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