The Evil Emperor of Irvine, California
Brock, David
David Brock THE EVIL EMPEROR OF IRVINE, CALIFORNIA Larry Agran, a Jane Fonda in Tom Hayden clothing, is winning a national following as California's most ambitious left-wing mayor, with an agenda...
...The U.N...
...There was a very good staff...
...Residents even pay to divide their trash into three separate bins as part of a city-wide recycling program, free in most cities...
...Some wonder whether the law makes illegal the use of brake cleaner, suede shoe cleaner, and even fingernail polish remover...
...Thus, contrary to the impression he tried to create, Agran willingly joined the group...
...We found that by not building the bridges [Agran's position], you put more pollutants into the environment...
...As in other locales, the conservatives find themselves out-gunned, as too few in their ranks care to become "activists" of whatever stripe...
...refusals by 120 cities to cooperate in a civil defense program proposed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which forced the scuttling of the plan...
...CID's "World Conference of Local Authorities" will meet at the U.N...
...The master plan provides for the building of an overpass to connect the road, but many in the immediate neighborhood oppose it...
...The city is also funding—to the tune of $36,000—a non-profit Sister City Foundation...
...An air conditioning serviceman said it would increase the price of air conditioning repairs in Irvine by $140 to $200...
...Members of a group called the Irvine Values Coalition thought the law legitimized an immoral lifestyle, and they collected signatures to put Measure N on the November 1989 ballot, to repeal the explicit protection of homosexuals...
...At the time, there were only five homeless families in Irvine, all housed by Irvine Temporary Housing (ITH), a non-profit group, in rent-subsidized apartments throughout the city, ensuring both privacy and decent accommodations...
...this summer...
...Ironically, Measure D had been dreamed up by Agran as a way of protecting himself from the voters, since its primary intent was to set up a system under which incumbents could run for mayor without giving up their council seats...
...Says former Mayor Vardoulis: "The city pays to send him to do his [CID] job...
...In appearances everywhere from National League of Cities conferences to meetings at New York's radical Riverside Church, Agran speaks of the "illegal U.S...
...Irvine has a sister city in Tsubuka, Japan, and is about to adopt another one, Hermosillo, Mexico...
...Agran lost his characteristic public composure following the defeat, and residents caught a glimpse of Mr...
...At the same time, Agran held a meeting of the steeringcommittee of his Local Elected Officials group to discuss its merger with the Center for Innovative Diplomacy, according to several LEO board members...
...Meanwhile, the infrastructure is deteriorating...
...has since agreed...
...Residents voted for city-hood in 1971...
...I'm a mom with three kids and I don't want gay pride festivals or public sex in bathrooms in my city," said Christina Shea, leader of the coalition...
...In 1988, an amendment to the city charter provided for the direct election of the mayor and the elimination of one council seat...
...W hat is happening in Irvine is a throwback to the old slow-growth Hayden theory: you purposely clog the roads by delaying expansion projects, enticing the electorate to draw the false conclusion that development means traffic congestion...
...In the meantime, the entire sordid affair has inspired an antagonistic editorial writer at the Orange County Register to tag Agran's cadre of supporters "Agranistas," and the name is sticking...
...UC Irvine professor Ray Catalano held the swing vote...
...Mayoral candidate Sheridan and her supporters are determined not to make the same mistake this go-round, in which control of the council is also at stake...
...Whether one agrees with their ends or not, there is no disputing that "Larry's social programs cost money," says Brien Manning, publisher of the Irvine World News, an award-winning weekly newspaper published by the Irvine Company...
...It was the second time in six months that an Agran-backed initiative had been rejected by the voters, and the mayor's machine is sputtering as the June race nears...
...nother Agran commission, the Irvine Science Advisory Task Force, worked with the council in the approval of a July 1989 law restricting the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) within the city's jurisdiction...
...Last spring, the state told supporters of the initiative in each community to raise one dollar for each $400 included in the bond measure to fund a signature-gathering campaign to get the bond on the ballot...
...The same paradigm is at work in Agran's war against the proposed San Joaquin Hills Freeway, a regional transportation corridor that would relieve traffic throughout Orange County...
...No wonder it's a pleasure for me to accept out-of-town speaking engagements...
...This view is reflected in his proposal to build an "urban village" of 28,000 residential units within a sprawling business park, the 2,500-acre Irvine Business Complex, which would increase residential density in the city by What is happening in Irvine is a throwback to the old Hayden theory: you stop certain kinds of growth by purposely clogging the roads...
...The goal was to "promote local responses to non-local matters: world peace, apartheid, nuclear weapons, Central America," Agran explains...
...Agran got the state to include in the proposed projects the construction of a monorail that would be linked to a downtown Irvine rail, extend throughout Irvine's John Wayne airport area, and connect to commuter train service to Los Angeles and Riverside...
...Then you push the "environmentalist" solution to the problem—more residential density, live-where-you-work schemes, and mass transportation—rather than simply building more and better roads...
...There are some civil servants who are allied with the mayor, and they order professional reports to be revised in relation to his positions...
...one can also subscribe to the magazine for eight dollars a year without joining DSA...
...Larry's view of Irvine is in marked contrast to the Southern California lifestyle, the reason people came to Irvine in the first place...
...Put into practice, the Agran plan has meant that "traffic is worse now, because some roads have actually gonefrom 4 to 2 lanes," says Howard Klein, an Irvine attorney...
...Finally, there is the atmosphere of divisiveness and dishonesty that Agran and his cabal have created, leading to the undeniable conclusion that Agran's consuming concern is power, in the service of an agenda he will not even own up to...
...Though the city was legally barred from participating financially in the campaign, Irvine's director of community development, Robert C. Johnson, wrote to several Irvine developers in early April 1989 encouraging "private individuals and private corporations to participate in this remarkable opportunity to build a twenty-first century transportation system—with all its benefits—right here in Irvine...
...As recently as two years ago, says Gil Ferguson, a local Republican assemblyman, "you could call Agran's office and they'd answer the phone 'Campaign California.' " Yet the very fact of Irvine's conservative demeanor adds a cover of reasonableness to the left-wing municipal foreign policy drive...
...The Agran political machine depends on a heavy turnout in the UCI neighborhoods, padded by a couple of thousand student absentee ballots, and in the mobile home parks, where Agran is popular for sponsoring a rent-control law (though his sympathies for a more expansive rent-control law have been kept in check...
...His tone is earnest, yet it also evokes the unmistakable hubris of Harvard Yard...
...But most of them have left...
...The hitch was that also in the June balloting voters had approved Measure D, providing a way for voters to petition for a special election for a seat vacated by the election of a mayor...
...It's probably easier if you have only three lawyers and their supporters, and you just decide what kind of a community you want to live in...
...Soon after taking power, the Agran majority on the council fired Irvine's first and only city manager, Bill Woollett, part of a plan to move Irvine from a city-manager form of government to an Imperial Mayoralty...
...We were told to cover that up...
...People wouldcome to city council meetings to testify on Larry's side of an issue, and half of them wouldn't live in Irvine," she says...
...That is the root of a conflict that has taken many forms...
...the non-Agran candidates tallied 26,351...
...The homeless and homosexuals have figured most prominently...
...The local reaction to the plan has been tepid...
...A city as economically vibrant and socially placid as Irvine is tough to wreck...
...Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, speaking to the National Lawyers' Guild, June 18, 1989 Irvine, California, 55 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, once just a vast expanse of orange groves, was founded in 1960 as the first of Orange County's master-planned "new towns...
...His carefully crafted game plan of appealing to a voting minority appears to have backfired, angering the majority...
...At the time, there were only five homeless families in Irvine...
...In one such case in 1986, after a judge ruled that residents of one city could not block a regional transportation plan, Hayden's Campaign for Economic Democracy filed a legal brief in support of California Supreme Court review (it was denied...
...Building out to the limits of the plan—which envisions a population of 225,000 by the year 2000—means more and wider roads...
...The miracle-maker has been listed in the Los Angeles Times as one of the "people to watch" in the county...
...Nonetheless, a smoking-gun on this question turned up in the January/February issue of the Democratic Left, the magazine of the Democratic Socialists of America...
...It's insidious...
...This silliness aside, the CFC ban demonstrates what Sheridan, a straight-shooting, personable real estate agent who is running against Agran in June's mayoral election, says is Agran's intense concern for his global agenda at the expense of what's best for Irvine...
...Insurance executive Cameron Cosgrove, the other Agran council candidate on the ballot, had come in third in the voting, entitling him as first runner-up to the seat...
...A guy comes on the scene nobody has ever heard of, and spends $9,000 in a race where all you need is 12,000 votes...
...If Agran wins the race and serves out his term, he says he hopes to go on to an appointed post in government,should either the White House or the Governor's Mansion fall into the hands of the Democrats...
...Agran became executive director of CID, at an annual salary of $25,000 (Agran's wife, Phyllis, now a successful pediatrician and a tenured UC Irvine professor, and pro-abortion activist, essentially subsidizes Agran's career), and Michael Shuman, a graduate of Stanford Law who used to run an international computer link called "Peace Net" in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was named president...
...policy in Central America...
...A California State Rail Bond initiative, slated for the June 1990 ballot, would provide $2 billion in funds for rail and transit projects throughout the state...
...What is more, after I raised the question, Agranaccused me of "red-baiting," an example of the technique he has used to great effect in silencing his critics in Irvine...
...n the end, Irvine voters may make Agran the political dinosaur extinct not only locally, but globally...
...By becoming a dues-paying member of DSA, which Agran did, one can get the magazine free of charge...
...Though the mayor spent $60,000 in city money to promote the bond and hold the election, the bond was defeated decisively, 75 to 25 percent...
...Agran has also involved Irvine as a party to a number of lawsuits that have challenged Orange County-authorized developer agreements...
...what we need is to put thousands of commuters on rail cars...
...O ne need look no further than Agran's Bulletin of Municipal Foreign Policy, which carries articles like "Some Tips for Building Nicaraguan Sister Cities" and "Think Globally, Sue Locally," as well as endorsements from the Rev...
...He's called for the entire budget for the Strategic Defense Initiative to be used to "help cities cope with growing traffic problems...
...Klein's motion for reconsideration was dismissed and the city council is threatening to seek recovery of court costs from him...
...A s Agran expanded his national reach, the locals back in Irvine, like Barbara Wiener, began to think something was fishy...
...Hank Adler, a former city commissioner, explains, "When Larry came into office, he said, 'We don't want any more backyard freeways.' The master plan concept was that we'd have major highways that would go around the city...
...The conference was organized by the Irvine-based Center for Innovative Diplomacy (CID), which in 1986 had subsumed Agran's Local Elected Officials group and become the umbrella organization for his municipal foreign policy push...
...This was his on-the-road Mr...
...David Brock THE EVIL EMPEROR OF IRVINE, CALIFORNIA Larry Agran, a Jane Fonda in Tom Hayden clothing, is winning a national following as California's most ambitious left-wing mayor, with an agenda that carries far beyond the Irvine city limits...
...If he loses, he'll still have his municipal foreign policy crusade, though without the imprimatur of Irvine, it's hard to see how Agran could maintain the kind of profile he's enjoyed, or keep his municipal foreign policy movement at its current pitch...
...Since then, Democrat Agran has been portrayed by a fawning press, both national and local, as Super-Liberal, managing to get elected in probably the most conservative area in the country, Orange County, which gave Ronald Reagan 67 percent of the vote in 1980, 73 percent in 1984, and George Bush 69 percent in 1988—a larger margin of Republican victory than in any other county in the country...
...On issues like the environment, transportation, child-care, controlling and directing land development, people demand an activist government...
...Agran's view is informed by a kind of Luddite environmentalism, a less-ismore, small-is-beautiful approach that mandates more, not less, density...
...Another developer told me: "We raised $300,000 after some of us at Trammell Crow, Mola Development, and Birtcher were told directly by the mayor that if the money wasn't paid, our projects wouldn't be approved...
...It would be more apt to say that Agran supports controlled-growth, provided that he's manning the control booth...
...Up to now, we haven't had the land use density to sustain such a system...
...erhaps in billing itself as a "new 1 way to live in an urban environment," Irvine invited in the likes of Larry Agran...
...The attorney general, John van de Kamp, who was featured at an April 1988 Agran fund-raiser, has contributed to Agran's 1990 mayoral campaign, and is now pushing the abortion pill for women in his race for governor, sat on the complaint for five months before deciding it had merit and could go to court...
...Today, many of Irvine's 110,000 residents are beginning to wonder whether paradise has been lost...
...He was against that...
...policy of support for the Nicaraguan resistance as "a policy that ultimately had as its objective the killing of Nicaragu an citizens and the violent overthrow of their popular Revolution...
...Two Irvine residents, Howard Klein and Cristina Bustos1Thomas, promptly challenged the move, petitioning the state attorney general for permission to sue...
...When I spoke with him recently in the coffee shop of the Irvine Hyatt hotel, Agran assumed his usual local Dr...
...But the true story of Agran's rise to power isn't quite so neat...
...While it shows how the adversarial culture of the far left thrived in places beyond Berkeley and Santa Monica even during the Reagan years, it also shows that once politicians on the left begin to be exposed, they can shrivel up as fast as an East bloc puppet regime...
...Hyde: at a community dinner, he strode to the dais and said he didn't know if the appropriate attire for the night was "black-tie or a hood...
...Agran gets mileage out of this seeming anomaly in appearances outside the community, too, as when he told the Macalester College Mayor's Forum in St...
...Residents will be unable to find air conditioner repairmen willing to invest in the costly recycling equipment required under the law, and Irvine's small businesses will not be able to compete with others in the area that are not so restricted, she said...
...Agran's mystique is built on such sleight-of-hand: he portrays himself as more moderate, and his constituents as more liberal, than the facts bear out...
...The bond issue would have raised $300 million to build and maintain city parks, assessing an annual tax of $120 per household...
...This works in tandem with voter apathy to produce enough votes—about 15,000—to win...
...A spokesman for Western Digital said his computer products firm, which is building a $100 million facility in Irvine, would lose its manufacturing capability if the law passed...
...By the 1980s, Irvine was one of the fastest growing cities in California, a major center of aerospace, computer, and high-tech manufacturing, and the locale U.S...
...Jekyll persona, outfitted in a Chamber of Commerce gray suit and rep tie, and exuding the winning personality of none other than the greatly competent Governor of Massachusetts...
...Agran's narrow constituencies add up, provided most everybody else stays home (voter turnout is typically 50 percent) and the opposition is divided...
...Purges and defections from the city staff have been nothing short of massive in the past few years...
...Agran schedules CID meetings to coincide with his official business in other parts of the country...
...That's the way they work it...
...Klein filed suit...
...In a short list of "DSAers who hold elective office" is the name Larry Agran...
...Department of Housing and Urban Development to remodel half of an Irvine dog kennel into a 60-bed shelter for the homeless...
...Any effort to name a sister city like Managua would likely meet significant opposition...
...News and World Report deemed the "best place to live in America...
...Vintage Agran myth-making, that, abetted by a media establishment which so desperately wants to believe it...
...more than 100 policies prohibiting cities from links with 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 firms doing business in South Africa...
...The ordinance does not bar the use of the compounds in automobile air conditioners or refrigerators, since there are no current substitutes, but it will require service stations and repair shops to capture and recycle the compounds...
...So the left moves in essentially unchallenged, and fights with every means available when the public discovers the sheep are wolves...
...For the reporting period that ended December 1989, Agran had raised $35,000, of which $13,000 came from outside Irvine...
...The problem was that there were three non-Agran candidates...
...A very small minority is against it, because they say it will siphon off traffic from the major arterioles into their neighborhoods," says newspaper publisher Manning...
...Painting himself as a sober, grassroots advocate of slow-growth and an environmentalist, he built up his core constituencies by beating up on the Irvine Company, which founded the community originally and still owns about a third of its land...
...The compounds are also associated with the so-called global-warming phenomenon...
...Thus, there isn't much public enthusiasm for the monorail, but the mayor has found a way around that hurdle...
...He had computerized mailings the likes of which we'd never seen...
...Meanwhile, Agran has found a way to link his monorail scheme to his peace dividend proposals, saying that the federal government shouldn't be spending "billions to put guided nuclear missiles on rail cars...
...He did some private legal work, then became a house-husband, and finally decided to run for elected office "largely because you look around and see what bumbling representation does exist," he once told the Los Angeles Times...
...He could never run successfully in the county, and an amendment to the city charter limits a mayor to two consecutive terms...
...Before the 1988 election, the Irvine city council had been split between Agran and his ally Ed Dornan, a junior college English professor, and realtor Sally Anne Sheridan and lawyer David Baker...
...The mayor's constituency-building has extended also to the UC Irvine campus, where, not surprisingly, he finds a sympathetic audience among both faculty and students...
...The council, now Agran-controlled, backed him up, and Cosgrove was sworn in...
...The Agran camp even has someone in her office monitoring her incoming calls, she says...
...Many of the city's high-tech businesses also objected...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 25 more than 30 percent...
...The freeway is now under construction, following an advisory vote taken last August in Irvine, at Agran's insistence (and at a cost of about $50,000 to the city), that showed 80 percent of the electorate backing the freeway...
...Agran's views on development, of course, are not necessarily incompatible with the developers...
...Agran's most cherished idea is a unilateral transfer of $30 billion a year, in each of five years, from military outlays (a cut three times the size of the one proposed by liberal Democrats in Congress) to "programs of proven effectiveness in our cities and towns," such as a "comprehensive social security system to provide income, health, nutrition and housing security for everyone, not just seniors...
...A look at some past races proves instructive in this respect...
...Irvine," Agran tells me, leaning over his fresh-fruit shake, "has the best run local government in the country...
...Flailing "twisted federal priorities" and "our entrenched warfare state," the mayor invokes the statistics as a sign of his political courage—usually when he's speaking outside of Irvine, that is...
...The outcome will likely hinge on the complex politics of development, the issue on which Agran has staked his local career...
...In compliance with the measure, 10 percent of the electorate so petitioned the city...
...Councilwoman Sheridan had more practical concerns...
...But because the charter does not explicitly prohibit an outgoing mayor from running for council, Agran is likely to run one of his cronies for mayor and rule Irvine from the council for two years, then run again for mayor...
...Paul, Minnesota, last year that "historically and philosophically, Orange County has been home to Richard Nixon and the John Birch Society...
...As an attorney myself . . . I've concluded one of the most important things we can do as attorneys or citizens generally is to take control of local government...
...But an element of the exotic was introduced one day in 1975, when Larry Agran came to town...
...Two weeks before the election, an article in an obscure newspaper published by Tom Hayden's pro-rentcontrol Campaign for Economic Democracy and circulated on the UC Irvine campus provided a glint of what was to come: the piece listed politicians who were helping spread CED's tentacles into unsuspecting communities, including, in Irvine, Larry Agran...
...But Agran's victory opened a third seat to complete his term...
...Agran's backers included fat-cat Los Angeles liberal Stanley K. Sheinbaum, and the Beverly Hills PAC "Women For," headed by a husky feminist from the Carter days, Marge Tabankin...
...For the Agran began pushing another agenda, through the 1,000-member Local Elected Officials group...
...I'm not on a crusade to wipe out homosexuals, but I'll fight if they want to bring homosexuality into the public arena...
...Agran, though, will have the advantage of incumbency, and a bigger war chest, much of it from outside Irvine...
...There was a big push to Agran received a $500,000 grant from HUD to remodel half of an Irvine dog kennel into a 60-bed shelter for the homeless...
...Under Agran, "people who have an axe to grind have been given the umbrella of Irvine political authority to grind them in public," in the form of proliferating city commissions, says former Councilwoman Wiener...
...Just the right sort of organizing effort and a very encouraging development," declaimed the esteemed Professor Chomsky...
...ITH opposed the plan, as did many citizens, who feared the shelter would lure street people and derelicts from surrounding towns, and further humiliate them by putting them in with stray dogs...
...On newer homes, they're paying all kinds of special assessments, for roads, for water districts, for schools, for landscape maintenance...
...Evidencing his penchant for a centralized government approach to perceived public problems, not to mention the insensitivity of a demagogue, Agran got a $500,000 grant from the U.S...
...Raised in California's San Fernando Valley, graduated from Harvard Law School with honors, groomed as a lawyer for the ACLU and a state senate committee, Agran moved to Irvine when his wife, Phyllis, was accepted at the University of California's medical school there...
...I f the mayor's development schemes 1 have such little support, how does he get his program enacted...
...Senior citizens in retirement developments are enticed with a combination of carrots and sticks...
...Although Agran has run under the broadly popular banner of slow-growth, a detailed look at his positions shows that this label is misleading, to say the least...
...Agran spent $50,000 against opponent Barry Hammond's $5,000 to win 57 percent of the vote for mayor...
...In light of the movement's credits, his enthusiasm becomes plainly understood: 900 resolutions passed around the country in favor of a nuclear weapons freeze...
...How much longer Agran thrives is an open question that will be settled in a heated reelection race this June...
...So that's how I'm a member...
...But Sherri Levine of the New York-based DSA says that is not the way it works...
...118 laws banning nuclear weapons production in local jurisdictions, an effort that coincided with the failure of the freeze movement...
...Dennis Wilberg, the former transportation director, left the city because the mayor and his supporters were holding up the approval of new roads in the hopes of creating a public clamor for mass transportation...
...As if to parody the neo-Stalinist aura he's created, Agran recently ordered that an armed police officer stand guard at each public meeting of the city council after a woman offered some critical comments about the mayor's reign...
...Confronted on the matter, Agran explains: "Well, I get their magazine, and if you subscribe to the magazine, you are automatically a member...
...Explaining his political beliefs, the mayor dismisses my suggestion that he is a socialist and even carefully avoids the L-word...
...Principally through the exercise of raw political power at City Hall...
...Sheridan charges that aides who staff Agran's city office, mostly UC Irvine students, also do CID work, though Agran denies this...
...The master plan is aimed precisely at preventing too much density and associated traffic problems...
...People were saying, 'you have enough money, if you can afford sister cities, you can afford parks,' " says Wiener...
...But now, as more of his policies come home to roost, Agran is a desperate man fighting for his political life...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 ange County boards that decide such matters, the city in effect is suing itself...
...Agran & Co...
...He registered to vote the same day he filed to run for city council," recalls Bill Vardoulis, who was Irvine'smayor at the time...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 27...
...Says one businessman: "This is extortion...
...William Sloane Coffin and Noam Chomsky, to figure out what the effort is all about...
...Over the objections of citizens who argued that it would encourage frivolous lawsuits, Big Brother record-keeping, and even affirmative action programs for homosexuals, the council passed the law...
...According to Craig Neustadter, a former transportation engineer for the city, Agran's end game is the fixed monorail system that he wants to build through the city...
...One executive of a local firm, who provided copies of virtually identical letters received by several local businesses, says his company got squeezed at bothends, once by the city for a direct contribution, and again by big developers, who passed the city assessment on to their subcontractors...
...Neustadter quit in March, when he could no longer work under the scrutiny, as he says, of "certain allies of the mayor, a fifth column, watching out for his interests, not the city's, in the day to day operation of the development process...
...While the names of those circulating and signing a petition are not disclosed ordinarily, the city attorney buckledunder Agran's pressure...
...raised $53,000 to defend the ordinance as opposed to the $13,000 Measure N's backers spent, but it passed with 53 percent of the vote...
...Urged on by environmental activists and encouraged by the Irvine action, several dozen cities have initiated some type of CFC ban, though none has been as draconian as Irvine's...
...Agran ran and won a two-year term...
...The Yale Overpass controversy demonstrates well the way Agran—in a now-classic Democratic style—is able to get elected in the first place...
...When Agran was in the minority and thus had difficulty attracting big business bucks, he succeeded in getting passed a $160 cap on political contributions from groupsor individuals...
...Agran's called it a "global village" and "Irvine's Champs Elysees," but he set his sights a bit lower in a memo to city staff, saying their time "would probably be well spent walking up and down Main Street in Disneyland" for design ideas...
...Todd Nicholson, president of the Industrial League of Orange County, who had testified against the ban, now notes that it has proved so unworkable that the city's new $70,000 "environmental coordinator" is having to issue all manner of exemptions...
...Agran's Irvine—where everybody would live in space-saving condominium developments and ride to work on energy-saving rapid transit—would be a flattened Manhattan...
...Acquiring the council majority, by hook or by crook, has allowed Agran to become in effect a majority of one, throwing wide open his Pandora's box of Fabian-style socialistic proposals...
...But Agran disregarded the move and refused to schedule another election, arguing—contrary to what the ballot measure specifically stated and to the city attorney's opinion—that Measure D did not apply to the 1988 election...
...Editorial revisions on the city's Environmental Impact Report on the Yale Overpass were slanted in the direction of the mayor's opinions...
...Roads themselves are not a solution to our mobility problems," he says...
...In February 1990, with Cosgrove still in the council seat, a judge ruled in his favor on the premise that since Agran had resigned his seat July 13, 1988, and the secretary of state had not officially made Measure D a part of the city charter until July 15, the council had grounds to seat Cosgrove...
...They could go to jail for this...
...In a more candid moment, Agran has been quoted as saying that the ultimate aim of the movement is to "take back foreign policy from the federal government...
...When Agran drew up a new bond issue proposal and called a special election for March of this year, Wiener decided to fight it...
...It bans the sale and use of plastic foam food packaging if the chemicals are used in their manufacture, the use of CFCs in industrial processes like cleaning computer circuit boards, and the use of building insulation containing the compounds...
...The crux of the issue is that scientists have said CFCs and other chlorinated solvents are destroying the earth's ozone layer, which protects the planet from ultraviolet radiation...
...So now we have six major roads going right through the city full of commuter traffic rather than one going around...
...It is also in complete contrast to the city's master plan, which embodies quite consciously the traditional American dream: a single-family house in the suburbs, a front and back yard, a couple of cars in the driveway...
...and featured as the crown jewel in a recent article in Orange County Magazine titled "Bucking the System: Democrats Challenge the GOP's Grip...
...But city money is helping underwrite CID...
...Agran claimed it would fund a "park system for the 21st century," including $600,000 for a working model farm,where the homeless would raise crops for the "needy...
...The outcome demonstrates Agran's environmentalism-without-pain approach: you feel good about "doing something," yet you don't really do anything...
...In his early years on the council, Agran, now 44, was a minority of one...
...Essentially, he pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy with respect to various Irvine residential enclaves by appealing to their special interests...
...Of course this had been accomplished already by the mayor...
...Agran proceeded to spend more than $140,000 in city funds to defend his anti-democratic maneuver...
...The residential tax bill is certainly going up," says former Councilwoman Wiener...
...In December, for example, the Irvine council established an Office of International Affairs, with a two-year budget of $110,000, that will work on a range of projects, from international trade assistance to reunification of refugees from Vietnam with their families...
...Reflecting the divisions in the scientific community on how to deal with CFC use, the Irvine council's move was opposed by Bela Lengyel, a retired university physicist and Irvine resident, who told the council that the effect of the ordinance on the globe's ozone layer "would be too small to be detected by any known scientific method...
...But this is par for the course in a community where, increasingly, "everyone is afraid of Larry," as Sheridan puts it...
...It was quite demoralizing," he goes on...
...and twenty-two local declarations of "sanctuary" for Salvadoran refugees, a political movement designed to foster opposition to U.S...
...Associates say the mayor fears someone may try to kill him, in the heat of a Ceausescu-style uprising...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 23 two open council seats, Agran ally Paula .Werner, a teacher, placed first, and Sheridan second...
...A local uproar spurred HUD to take back the money after Agran refused to consider another site...
...We pay to recycle, rather than save money recycling," says Wiener...
...A gran introduced hardball politics to Irvine with the Cosgrove Caper...
...In the course of an interview, Agran uses nonthreatening, bipartisan terms to describe the movement to get cities to enact foreign policy measures, expounding on such initiatives as cultural exchanges and trade and investment links with foreign cities...
...Though they are outnumbered by Republicans, Democrats vote at a 10 percent higher rate than do Republicans...
...As opposed to the suburban bedroom communities of the 1950s, the idea was to create several "villages" within the city—each with its own look and feel—combining homes, workplaces, shopping, schools, and open space...
...In 1988, the two Agran-backed candidates for city council together won 22,366 votes...
...hailed by Irvine political scientist Mark Baldassare as the "perfect example of a new fiscal populist leader...
...And he thrived for a time, like a parasite on a healthy plant...
...cities by the U.S...
...Nikolaj Grinenko, an elderly Irvine resident, was recently arrested by the Irvine police for "unauthorized" recycling efforts...
...Grinenko liked to pass his days picking up bottles and cans in his neighborhood and donating the money he received for them to charity...
...This is how it works: CID director Agran is paid to promote CFC bans and get them passed...
...The essential analytical point here is that Agran, contrary to his reputation, does not attract many conservative votes...
...Conference of Mayors, Agran's proposed change in federal budget policies would eliminate 6,920 Orange County jobs and mean a loss of $6.3 million annually from Irvine's economy...
...In Irvine, the GOP has a 65-35 percent advantage in voter registration, the local congressman is right-wing Republican Chris Cox, and the airport is named after John Wayne...
...The width of grass strips along the streets, the color of roof tiles on the regimented houses, the length of time garage doors could stay open—everything was ordered in the place, geographically larger than Boston and San Francisco combined...
...Sheridan had raised $16,000, with less than $800 coming from non-Irvine sources...
...ut the bigger question for Irvine residents is whether they want their city to continue to be Dr...
...He set up a straw man, claiming the road would be eighteen lanes when in fact no one had proposed any such thing...
...In1988, Agran's human rights commission drew up an ordinance banning discrimination in employment and housing on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, sexual preference, or physical handicap...
...in one case, residents in a complex were told that if they did not vote for the mayor they would lose the traffic light that enables them to cross the street safely to a nearby shopping center...
...But Agran is against roads, not to mention the automobile...
...Still, their skepticism wasn't enough to stop his council colleagues from giving him his turn at the revolving mayorship in 1986, and they went along again in 1988, when Agran drafted and got passed a provision for the popular election of mayors...
...Hyde mode, in which he exposes not only his true ideological colors, but also his disdain for the political culture in which he has built his career...
...Irvine became the first city in the country to enact such a sweeping CFC ban on July 18, three days before a conference of two dozen local officials convened in Irvine to launch a national effort to restrict CFCs...
...A committed ideologue, Agran clearly isn't in this to make money...
...Several Irvine professors have sat on Agranappointed boards and commissions and defended him vociferously at city council meetings...
...Residents have charged that the Agran tactic is a publicity stunt that wastes taxpayer money, because as a member of the OrHow much longer Agran thrives is an open question that will be settled in a heated re-election race this June...
...From summer 1990 on, 400 to 500 businesses in Irvine that use the CFC compounds must adapt their equipment to prevent the gases from entering the atmosphere...
...The move was an unprecedented use of a bond issue, which usually goes to fund a long-term capital expenditure: two-thirds of the revenue generated under the plan would have gone to the operation and maintenance of city facilities...
...Money spent on "general government expenditures"—the cost of running the city's bureaucracy —has increased from $5.5 million in 1986 to $10 million in 1989, according to the city's annual financial report for 1989...
...What is more, according to several local executives, the letters were followed up with phone calls from city officials—in at least one case by Agran's shadow on the city council, Ed Dornan—threatening that if the payments weren't made, the companies would lose their city contracts or entitlements...
...1,300 sister-city arrangements between American cities and foreign cities, "especially so-called adversary cities," as Agran has phrased it...
...Aside from the hyper-planning, Irvine is an archetypical suburb, affluent but by no means chichi, where straightlaced engineers toil in low-rise glass ofDavid Brock is a senior editor of Insight magazine...
...Vardoulis saw the article, scratched his head, and decided not to make anything of it...
...Agran sent fliers addressed only to "residents of Turtle Rock, University Town Center and Rancho San Joaquin," three of Irvine's more exclusive neighborhoods, informing them that "the San Joaquin Hills Freeway will slash through the beautiful coastal hillsides behind Turtle Rock Village and UCI...
...There wasn't the usual consultation with groups that would have been affected by the law," which could have made for a more workable one...
...The CID meeting produced a call for an international gathering of mayors and local officials under United Nations sponsorship to discuss ozone depletion and to sign a "stratospheric protection accord...
...Members of the Orange County Visibility League, a group of self-described "militant gay activists," sponsored marches, acts of civil disobedience, and even kiss-ins on the streets of Irvine in the midst of the Measure N battle...
...Others noted that the alternatives currently available are flammable and could endanger employee safety, be carcinogenic, or pollute the water...
...This is quite reminiscent of the fraudulent manner in which he has sold himself to Irvine's electorate, but more about that later...
...Sheridan reports that a campaign of intimidation by the Agran forces has begun, causing her to lose some real estate clients and receive threatening telephone calls from anonymous antagonists...
...fice buildings, shop in ghastly strip malls, and drive home on wide, clogged roads...
...The city itself had long ago chosen "another day in paradise" as its motto, but that was before a serpent slipped into the garden...
...In March 1986, for example, Agran attended the National League of Cities convention in Washington, D.C., and according to city records filed expenses of $727.55 for air-fare and hotel...
...Still, at CID's instigation, Agran has played host to a Nicaraguan baseball team and to the Veterans Peace Convoy, a Sandinista-support group which collected food and money for distribution in Managua...
...That same report shows that total revenue from taxes increased from $27.7 million in 1986 to $41.9 million in 1989...
...For Irvine's $125 million, $312,500 had to be generated locally...
...Many moderates and conservatives simply can't abide his connection to "globalism" or, more generally, to the radical left...
...Calling him a "liberal Democrat [who] thrives as a maverick in Republican territory," an editorial in the March 22 New York Times praised Agran for his work in the peace dividend field...
...As the Cold War winds down, a development, by the way, achieved with the very policies Agran has spent years vilifying, he is pushing his plan to gut military spending even harder, on the dubious claim that "economic security" has displaced traditional military preparedness as the linchpin of our national security...
...Jekyll's laboratory for the global agenda of CID, a $300,000 a year operation with close ties to Tom Hayden's renamed Campaign for Economic Democracy, Campaign California...
...The design is to make people fed up with driving...
...Almost all of Agran's Irvine supporters were Irvine city employees, UC faculty, andyes—developers, hedging their bets...
...And Cosgrove's attorney spent weeks deposing the citizens who had circulated the petition for a new election under Measure D, sending an intimidating signal to anyone who might try to fight Agran's city hall...
...According to his Bulletin of Municipal Foreign Policy, Agran has also "met with the Palestinian mayor of Nazareth, and turned up at trials of arrested anti-contra demonstrators...
...The decision came rather suddenly for the tame local political establishment...
...wars in Vietnam and Grenada," advocates an immediate, unilateral ban on nuclear weapons testing, and describes the U.S...
...Many see it as grim social engineering more appropriate to North Korea than Southern California...
...It is suggested that a contribution of $10 per employee in your organization, or any amount you can justify, will assist in providing the funds necessary...
...The highways were stalled by a small group and no one can butt heads with the mayor," says Wilberg, who is now hiring former Irvine officials as consultants to do work for him in nearby Mission Viejo, where he holds the same job he had in Irvine...
...On Memorial Day 1988, the convoy was welcomed by Agran at a city hall reception that attracted many of Southern California's pro-Communist activists, including representatives of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador...
...Mayor Agran, who makes $10,000 a year to tend part-time to Irvine's business, sees to it that the CID mission is accomplished in his city, and then touts the Irvine law as a model for CID's members...
...Complaints on these matters have been filed with California's Fair Political Practices Commission...
...A member of the ITH board, Agran later retaliated by getting its director, Jim Palmer, fired...
...Their expectations are by no means conservative," he says...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 adopt it on first reading before the weekend meeting of Local Elected Officials in Irvine...
...The Agran council has blocked an extension and widening of Yale Road, a major north-south thoroughfare that is blocked in two spots, once by a freeway and once by a railway...
...But he now routinely violates the limit by getting large "in kind" contributions from Irvine groups with which he has close ties...
...According to a study of four U.S...
...At the same time, his intellectual intolerance and sheer political brutality have alienated many liberals...
...For example, the Irvine Conservancy, on whose board Agran sits, and Irvine Citizens United, which originally formed to fight Measure N, both contributed cash in addition to sending out mailers soliciting funds for the 1990 Agran Campaign...
...Most smaller cities or medium-sized cities can be easily controlled politically with about five lawyers and some of their supporters...
...Nonetheless, Agran was able to convince his colleagues that to turn down the law would be to "kiss off the future of the globe...
...The whole thing was a political act," says Nicholson...
...The goal was to "promote local responses to non-local matters: world peace, apartheid, nuclear weapons, Central America...
...In a December 1989 CID fund-raising letter, Agran opened by recounting Irvine's establishment of "concrete programs addressing the threats of ozone depletion and global warming...
...Agran's Irvine has been at the forefront of a much wider national debate on the use of CFCs...
...I can't say so without anonymity, but if a judge asks me about it, I will...
...It was Larry against the big bad developer," says Barbara Wiener, who served with Agran on the council for four years...
...Outside of Irvine, Agran began pushing another agenda, through the 1,000-member Local Elected Officials group, which he founded in 1983...
...Then we looked at some of his contributor lists, and they were full of things like big labor unions in Los Angeles...
Vol. 23 • May 1990 • No. 5
