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Voters make change for the Anaheim City Council

After the headline-grabbing resignation of the last mayor, Anaheim is poised to start fresh next month when a new mayor and council members are sworn in.

At least two of the three council seats that were on the Nov. 8 ballot will be taken by a new face (the third race remains close and ballot counting continues) – and with District 4 Councilmember Avelino Valencia looking like the victor in a state Assembly race, his seat will be up for appointment by the seven-member council.

Some residents have been demanding changes after an embarrassing scandal in the spring involving alleged corruption and outside influences at work in City Hall. And long-held complaints about whether there is too much focus on the resort district were raised again this election season.

But how much change should residents expect in city policies, and how friendly will Anaheim’s tourism industry – which funds about 45% of Anaheim’s budget through hotel taxes – find the new council toward its interests?

While they may disagree on the larger implications of the election, some observers see Ashleigh Aitken’s victory in the mayor’s race as a sign residents wanted change at City Hall.

Aitken, an attorney who came within a few hundred votes of the mayor’s seat in 2018, will fill a leadership void left when Mayor Harry Sidhu resigned in May following the revelation that he was under federal investigation for alleged corruption. (Sidhu has not been charged with any crimes, and his attorney has maintained that a fair and impartial investigation would find no wrongdoing.)

“Ashleigh, as a former federal prosecutor, made a convincing case that she can restore honesty and integrity to City Hall, and that’s a pretty compelling job experience to bring to the mayor’s office,” said state Assemblyman Tom Daly, a longtime Anaheim resident who himself served as mayor from 1992 to 2002.

Lupe Ramirez – who organized residents of her mobile home park to petition Anaheim officials for rent relief and tried to launch two recalls of Sidhu because they felt he dismissed their concerns – is disappointed with how some of the council races turned out, but she expects Aitken will fight for people like her, she said. “At this point, we all kind of trust her.”

Aitken defeated three opponents, including Mayor Pro Team and District 6 Councilmember Trevor O’Neil, to win a four-year term on the dais. She’ll be the city’s first female mayor.

The other newly minted city leaders are Orange County Business Council Chief Operating Officer Natalie Rubalcava in District 3, and retired Anaheim public works director Natalie Meeks in District 6.

In District 2, the race between Councilmember Gloria Ma’ae, appointed in 2021, and business development manager Carlos Leon remained too close to call Friday, with Leon in the lead by only a double-digit difference.

‘A change election’

Big questions going into the recent election were what voters were looking for after the last mayor left under a cloud, and whether political action committees would lie low or spend big as in past cycles.

As to the mayor’s seat, some said the voters’ choice of Aitken over O’Neil (who typically voted as part of Sidhu’s majority and fiercely defended the deal to sell Angel Stadium until it imploded amid the corruption allegations) could be read as a rejection of the old regime.

O’Neil said as a council member his “priorities were strengthening public safety, driving economic growth, and protecting taxpayers.  I stepped up to run for mayor, not for political aspirations, but because I felt it was the right thing to do in order to keep Anaheim on the path to prosperity.”

Former councilmember James Vanderbilt – who joined other residents and activists to form the Clean Up Anaheim Coalition, which urged Disney and other resort businesses to stay out of Anaheim’s elections – said the apparent loss of both incumbents tells him voters saw them as connected to the Sidhu scandal.

“I think that says that the public recognized that they didn’t want to continue to have that,” he said.

As Chapman University political science professor Fred Smoller summed it up, “It was a change election.”

But look beyond the mayor’s race and it was more of a mixed bag, he said, or “a tale of two elections,” in which at least two of the three candidates backed by the business-funded political action arm of Support Our Anaheim Resort Area (SOAR) easily won their races.

SOAR poured more than $1.2 million into supporting three council candidates: Ma’ae, Rubalcava and Meeks. Executive Director Jill Kanzler said in an email that after getting to know the candidates through questionnaires and interviews, SOAR chose to back the three women because of their community involvement and long-term commitment to the city, and because they understand the issues facing Anaheim and the value the resort district brings to the city.

“We believe every election is important and that Anaheim residents deserve to be well informed about the candidates and the issues that matter to them. This election saw many individuals and groups participate in our democratic process, even the Orange County Register participated in Anaheim elections through its endorsements and coverage,” Kanzler said. “Ultimately, we trust voters to weigh all the information they receive and make informed decisions that best reflect their ideals.”

The Register’s editorial board does its own interviewing of candidates and makes endorsement choices separate of the newsroom’s coverage.

Anaheim limits individual contributions to candidates at $2,200, so the big money expenditures are typically by political action committees that are not associated with the candidates.

SOAR certainly wasn’t alone – political action committees for the city’s police and firefighters spent about $400,000 combined; committees representing hotel, grocery and other workers chipped in a similar amount; and groups with names such as the Orange County Jobs Coalition and Reform Local Government spent tens of thousands to boost their preferred candidates.

But, as in past elections, SOAR looks to have been the biggest single spender, and some worry that could mean City Hall may return to business as usual. In the past, that has meant lucrative contracts for the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce, subsidies for luxury hotels and millions of dollars given to the city’s tourism bureau in the first month of the pandemic, when no one knew how long Disneyland and other attractions might be closed.

Longtime city government critic Mike Robbins said the result is more people with the same agenda, though he was pleased about the former mayor’s departure and attributed it in part to the work of his watchdog group, the People’s Homeless Task Force OC.

When money is potentially at stake, “it’s always cost-effective to make a major investment in the council races,” Smoller said – say, as compared to the cost of the council voting to put a tax on theme park tickets.

But others say Anaheim’s new council does represent a fresh start, regardless of who supported candidates’ campaigns.

Daly, who worked with Meeks at the city before she retired, said he thinks the two new councilwomen are smart, independent thinkers.

“What you want is council members who are not owned by anyone, and I don’t see Meeks or Rubalcava as being owned by anyone,” he said.

Rubalcava said people during her campaigning told her they wanted someone who would be engaged in the city and address everyday issues such as neighborhood parking problems and police response times. If the council can show they’re working to improve the lives of residents, she said that will help rebuild the trust that was broken by the recent scandal.

“At the end of the day, if I have to vote no on something because it doesn’t feel right for the people of the district, that’s what I’m going to do,” Rubalcava said.

Meeks could not be reached.

Going forward

It’s unclear whether the new Anaheim council will have a consistent majority voting bloc, or which way one might lean. That could be a potential pitfall ahead for Aitken, something Tom Tait well knows from being on the losing end of split votes during the first part of his time as mayor; he served from 2010 to 2018.

When the council tried to limit the mayor’s powers or push proposals he wouldn’t support, Tait said, “my strategy was to go straight to the people and state the case and bring those deals to light. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Ramirez and Robbins agreed that even after a changing of the guard, residents will have to remain vigilant to ensure council members don’t try to bend City Hall to the will of campaign donors.

“We are not going to stop, we’re going to watch them like a hawk and we’re going to report everything related to their contributions and their votes,” Robbins said.

Rubalcava said that won’t be an issue for her, because she didn’t seek office in order to serve campaign contributors.

“I ran because I have kids who are living in the city, my grandparents who live here, my dad, my mom,” she said. “We’re going to be here after the four-year term.”


Source: Orange County Register

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