Irvine Mayor Larry Agran
Larry Agran was first elected to the Irvine City Council in 1978. Since then, Agran has arguably had more to do with Irvine becoming a world-class city than any other person not named Donald Bren (the longtime chairman and sole owner of The Irvine Company).
Agran’s career has been marked by many notable achievements, any one of which would be a career highlight for most Councilmembers in other cities. There was his leadership on the City’s chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) ban, which became a model for similar actions by local and national governments worldwide and may have saved the planet from destruction of the ozone layer. Closer to home, Agran led the fight against a proposed international airport at the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, which would have devastated the City with noise and air pollution. Instead, Agran established the 1300-acre Great Park, now under construction. He’s also responsible for Irvine’s magnificent 10,000-acre Open Space Preserve.
Still fighting for the interests of Irvine residents, in just the past two years Agran was able to get: the district elections and Council expansion that was first implemented in last month’s election; construction underway for a number of new resident-requested amenities at the Great Park, including the Veterans Memorial Park & Gardens; the replacement of a dangerous asphalt plant in North Irvine with a new 700-acre nature preserve; and the downsizing of a proposed outdoor amphitheater at the Great Park from a massive Hollywood Bowl-sized venue (17,500 seats) to a more appropriate Greek Theater-sized amphitheater (5,900 seats).
Agran was the top vote-getter in both the 2022 Council election and this year’s mayoral contest, despite big-money special interest groups spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat his all-volunteer grassroots campaigns.
Last week, Agran was sworn-in as the new Mayor of Irvine, and he sat down with Irvine Community News & Views to discuss the state of the City and what he’d like to achieve in his new term.
ICNV: What are your priorities for the next two years?
Agran: Two issues that I want to especially work on near-term are affordable housing and establishing a living wage so that people who work in Irvine have the means to also live here. I also believe we can take real, concrete steps to reduce the City’s carbon footprint, plus I think it’s time to establish a City fire department to take over from the Orange County Fire Authority, which will save the City’s taxpayers tens of millions of dollars annually. So those four things, I would say, are achievable in the next two years and would benefit our City and its residents for decades to come.
What do you mean by near-term affordable housing?
Frankly, the state has been forcing draconian housing measures on cities and counties, mandating that Irvine allow 57,000 new housing units in order to get 10,000 affordable units, which would decimate our planned community. Plus, it will take up to 20 years to get those affordable housing units, when the need is pressing on us as a city and a society right now. I’m proposing that the City work with the Irvine Company, which has tens of thousands of existing rental units, to come up with a public-private partnership plan that will convert 5,000 of those existing apartments into affordable units in the next five years.
And then also a living wage?
That’s a separate issue, involving different interest groups, but the two items are related. In this last Council term, I proposed that the City adopt a living wage ordinance mandating that City employees and employees of large contractors working for the City be paid at least $20 per hour. I think we can get that or something similar enacted soon, and then take a look at expanding our living wage policy to cover employers and employees citywide.
The fight against global warming likely faces some tough sledding nationally and perhaps even globally for the next four years. What can Irvine do?
The first thing we can do is pull the plug on the Orange County Power Authority (OCPA), which is based on a fabrication. This is an agency that has been promising and claiming to provide green energy to Irvine when in fact the electricity delivered to OCPA customers is the exact same electricity that goes to Southern California Edison ratepayers. OCPA is a commodities speculator, not a power provider. It does absolutely nothing — zero — to reduce the City’s carbon footprint. It buys contracts, futures, credits, whatever for green energy, but if OCPA didn’t purchase those, someone else would. If OCPA had never existed, the energy mix on the state grid would look exactly the same as it does today.
Meanwhile, OCPA has amassed nearly $100 million in operating reserves — to boost its credit rating so it can wheel and deal in the energy market. That money is a result of gouging the ratepayers, most of them here in Irvine. We’ll be working to get that money back and to use it for real climate action.
What I’m proposing is a City program of low-interest loans to homeowners to install rooftop solar and battery systems, which would lower their energy costs by a significant amount immediately and take those costs to near-zero when their loan is paid off in, say, 10 years. With that incentive, we could solarize tens of thousands of the City’s rooftops in the next five to ten years, with real and measurable reductions in the use of energy produced by fossil fuels.
I’m also working to create an Irvine Forestation Master Plan that will see many, many thousands of trees planted throughout the City in the next ten years, helping mitigate heat-island effects and clean our air while sequestering carbon and also beautifying Irvine. Currently, Irvine’s “tree canopy” is 21%. We can get that up to more than 30%, which will be the highest tree canopy coverage in Southern California — bringing us real and measurable benefits.
Another program with great return on investment that we’ve begun over the past couple of years is working with the school districts to restore school bus service for students. Each bus takes up to 100 daily car trips off the road, plus it’s a real help to working families. I am determined to expand this program.
You say it’s time for the City to create its own fire department. How would that work?
Decades ago, we decided to stop contracting for police services and, instead, we established our own Irvine Police Department. That decision not only saved the City’s taxpayers millions of dollars, it also greatly improved the police protection we receive. Right now, we are transitioning away from the Orange County Public Library system and establishing our City’s own library system. This will also save the taxpayers millions of dollars while improving and expanding library services throughout Irvine.
As far as fire and emergency services, according to an analysis by the City staff, Irvine taxpayers are being overcharged more than $80 million annually by the Orange County Fire Authority. Allowing that to continue would, in my view, be municipal malpractice. We’re going to move on this.
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