Why We Must Recall Mayor Shea and Councilmember Carroll
By: Dr. Kev Abazajian
Tags: Orange County, Irvine, Corruption, Politics

The Short Story

A single developer has spent so much political money in Irvine as to take control of the City Council, and that representation is completely out of line with the values of our community.

FivePoint Holdings spent $106,088 to get Christina Shea elected to Irvine City Council in the November 2016 election to make sure that they get to develop the ARDA site, and numerous other favorable decisions from the Council in their development plans. The last elected mayor, Don Wagner, had 25 times more money spent by developers, including FivePoint, than he could raise himself in the 2016 election. Since then, the powers-that-be have arranged to have both Irvine’s Mayor and Mayor Pro Tem to be unelected appointments: Mayor Christina Shea and Mayor Pro Tem Mike Carroll. Both of them are in place to simply act on behalf of FivePoint and their own personal agendas, not on behalf of Irvine’s residents.

Key to FivePoint’s development plans is stopping the Orange County Veterans Cemetery and Memorial Park from happening at its originally planned location. Irvine residents voted nearly 2 to 1 against a land swap proposal in June 2018, but the Council, led by Mayor Shea and Mayor Pro Tem Carroll, have refused to listen to the voters and residents. This has led to a ballot initiative effort that will designate the original ARDA location as that for the cemetery.

On top of all that, Shea and Carroll bring representation to our Council that is out of line with Irvine’s values of being inclusive and diverse. Christina Shea got on Irvine City Council in 1992 after leading an anti-gay-rights initiative, when she told the LA Times “I don’t want gay pride festivals or public sex in bathrooms in my city” while promoting a ballot measure allowing discrimination of gays and lesbians in Irvine. The homophobia continues. In June 2019, Shea and Carroll stopped a proposal to fly the pride flag at Irvine City Hall, with Carroll calling the pride flag a “spectacle of divisiveness.” At the U.S. Conference of Mayors in June, Shea voted against 4 climate change resolutions, being only one of a few mayors out of over 200 to do so. She was also only one of a few to vote against 7 immigration protection resolutions, including support for the United Nations’ Global Compact for Migration, which simply protects the human rights of immigrants.

We must take back elected control of our Council that represents the will of the residents of Irvine and is in line with the values of our community. You can do so right now by downloading and signing the petition as an Irvine voter at this link.

The long story follows below…

40% of Irvine’s Mayor-Council is unelected, by using procedural maneuvers in 2019.

The Long Story

Enough is Enough

As Irvine residents, we have had enough: enough of the duplicity, the diversion tactics and the disregard for our own votes. We have had enough of the corrupting influence of developer money that funds our City Council candidates at exorbitant levels, at times 25-to-1 relative to residents’ support. We have had enough of the “anywhere but ARDA” diversion tactics of the Shea-Carroll-FivePoint scheme to move the long-planned OC Veterans Cemetery from ARDA so that FivePoint can develop that land into department stores and office buildings. And, most importantly, we have had enough of the corruption that puts into place officials who do not represent the values and priorities of our community. To fully appreciate why such drastic change is necessary, and necessary right now, we must first be reminded of the past.

OC Register article on developer spending in the 2016 General Election, including $106,088 by FivePoint for Christina Shea’s Council run.

A Long History

There is a long history of the effort to build the OC Veterans Cemetery in Irvine. The initial April 2016 FivePoint diversion to move the Veterans Cemetery to the Freeway location was proposed to our council by Councilmember Shea — and defeated at that meeting. To ensure its future passage, $1.1 million of developer and special interest money was spent to solidify developers’ influence over our Irvine City Council in the 2016 election, including 25 times more money spent by PACs on behalf of the Mayoral candidate Don Wagner than by Wagner’s own campaign. On top of that, $106,088 was spent by FivePoint specifically to get Christina Shea elected to Council in the November 2016 election to make sure that the land swap proposal was to come back, and it did.

$106,088 was spent by FivePoint specifically to get Christina Shea elected to Council in November 2016

Like clockwork, the Shea-FivePoint proposal for the land swap was reintroduced then got approved by a majority in October 2017. But, within 30 days, dozens of volunteers galvanized to get 19,125 petition signatures to force the zoning ordinance for the land swap to go to the ballot. The move of the cemetery from the ARDA site was defeated 63% to 37% by No on Measure B, despite FivePoint and their partner developer spending $900,000 in mailers full of lies to try and win the ballot measure.

Headline in Irvine Community News and Views in July 2018 after defeat of the FivePoint land swap tactic on the Veterans Cemetery.

Now, it has not been too long since the July 23, 2019 City Council meeting where Irvine’s City Council again rejected the ARDA location, and not too long after the July 18 meeting when Mayor Shea revealed that the golf course site was a diversion tactic. Residents have spoken, but developer influence wields so much undue influence on our Council, trying to defeat the will of the people. Residents want to preserve the amount of green space in our City and Great Park. They have voted to build the OC Veterans Cemetery on the original ARDA site. Shea and Carroll still will not listen.

You may ask, why is Mayor Christina Shea our mayor instead of simply on the City Council, since she was voted to Council in 2016 and not to Mayor, as Don Wagner was? By a rule change in January 2019, the Council changed the process so that the Mayor Pro Tem, Christina Shea at the time, would ascend to the Mayor if the developer-funded Mayor Wagner were to resign, since right after being elected to mayor in November 2018, Wagner announced running for OC Supervisor in a March 2019 election. So, Mayor Shea became our first unelected mayor in the past 30 years.

Within 6 weeks, Mayor Shea schemed with FivePoint to appoint Michael Carroll to her now empty Council seat. Michael Carroll’s qualifications were serving on the planning commission for a few months, and writing a book on a government conspiracy theory back in 2005. Councilmember Carroll adds to make our Mayor-Council now 40% unelected. In an almost comic move to increase the level of absurdity in our nominally elected representation, Shea and Carroll schemed to appoint Carroll to be the Mayor Pro Tem in December 2019, so that the top two officials in Irvine are now both unelected.

Mayor Pro Tem Carroll should be removed based on that enormous unelected fraction, on top of his participation in the Shea-FivePoint scheme of the diversion tactic of the golf course site. Importantly, Carroll is connected directly with FivePoint’s efforts to control our City’s elected boards, with his wife Betty Carroll receiving FivePoint PAC spending at the level of $14,000 for her 2016 Irvine school board run.

Not Our Values

All this developer influence has made our Council detached from the values and issues that are important to our community. Christina Shea gained prominence in Irvine when she bashed OC’s LGBTQ+ community and successfully passed a ballot measure in 1989 to remove their protection from discrimination by a city ordinance, saying she thought protecting lesbians and gays from discrimination would lead to “public sex in bathrooms” in Irvine, “her city” where she did not want “gay pride festivals.”

*Christina Shea got on Irvine City Council in 1992 after leading an anti-gay-rights initiative, when she told the LA Times “I don’t want gay pride festivals or public sex in bathrooms in my city” when promoting a ballot measure allowing discrimination of gays and lesbians in Irvine.

Based on her prominence in leading a homophobic initiative, Shea was then elected to Irvine City Council in 1992. Her anti-LGBTQ+ positions continue today, with her opposition to the flying of the Pride Flag on Irvine City Hall this past June on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, even though Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Laguna Beach, Anaheim and Santa Ana’s City Halls flew the Pride Flag that month.

Even more for the month of June, at the United States Conference of Mayors, Mayor Shea voted to reveal how much she is not aligned with our City’s values. Irvine started as a green city, protecting trees from being removed in the City with its first ordinance in 1971. When our planet was faced with an existential threat from the ozone hole in the 1980’s, we were the first municipality to comprehensively ban the responsible chemicals, CFCs.

Instead of continuing our City’s lead on crucial environmental issues, at June’s U.S. Mayors’ Conference, Mayor Shea voted against four climate change resolutions, being one of only a few city mayors, out of 226 present, to vote against the climate-action resolutions. She was one of only three mayors to vote against establishing Green Banks to meet Climate Change and Resiliency Goals. Green Banks are common-sense funding mechanisms that “can be used by residents and / or businesses to do more sustainable projects by offering loans, leases, credit enhancements and other financial services to close funding gaps for clean energy projects and energy efficiency improvements.”

In December 2019, the Irvine City Council voted to look into forming a Community Choice Energy (CCE) partnership with neighboring cities. This was a good step, but comes over 20 years too late relative to CCE’s formed in Massachusetts and northern California (sometimes called Community Choice Aggregation (CCA)). Plus, CCE’s are far from guaranteed to achieve the goals we need for sufficient climate action. We need much, much more from our community because we only have until 2030 to slash all carbon emissions by 45%, as reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As a City, Irvine has been on the forefront of environmental action, so we must exceed the minimal goal to set the proper pathways for other municipalities, states and nations. We have the resources and technology to go net zero or even net negative within ten years with existing technologies and financial structures, as detailed in our OC Register Op-Ed.

We are amidst a climate emergency, and Mayor Shea voted against four climate action resolutions at the June 2019 U.S. Conference of Mayors, and tries to block those asking for bold action from speaking, and Councilmember Carroll walks out.

As detailed in that Op-Ed, an Irvine Community News and Views Op-Ed, and in a follow-up Medium article, we show that targeting the electricity sector of carbon production, as CCE does, acts on only about 30% of Irvine’s energy usage and carbon emission sources, with the rest in natural gas usage and transportation. Instead of relying on 20 year old measures, we should be a leading city in tackling climate change, such as the City of Ann Arbor, which has set a definitive carbon-zero goal by 2030. Irvine should be a bold leader in climate action efforts, since as a City, we led municipal efforts to save the Earth from the depleting ozone layer.

On top of Mayor Shea’s no votes on climate change resolutions, she voted against seven immigration protection resolutions at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, again being only a handful of mayors to do so out of 226 present. She was one of only five mayors to vote against the United Nations’ Global Compact for Migration, which simply protects the human rights of immigrants. In addition, Mayor Shea led the effort to repeal the City of Irvine’s living wage ordinance in 2015, one week after Los Angeles voted to raise its minimum wage to $15 per hour. All of these moves do not reflect the values of our City and our community.

**On June 11, 2019, Councilmember Carroll spoke of the Pride Flag as a “spectacle of divisiveness” when the Pride Flag was being considered to be flown on Irvine’s City Hall.

Like Mayor Christina Shea’s intolerance, Councilmember Carroll is completely at odds with our community’s values. On June 11, 2019, Councilmember Carroll spoke of the Pride Flag as a “spectacle of divisiveness” when the Pride Flag was being considered to be flown on Irvine’s City Hall. That’s not Irvine. It’s not our inclusivity and diversity, and such views certainly should not be on our Council. In addition, Mr. Carroll acted in the 2018 election in the undemocratic attempt to rob California 48th Congressional District voters from having a choice between a Democrat and Republican in what was a crucial election year. Mr. Carroll supported Scott Baugh in an attempt to make the top-two primary in that district not have a Democratic opponent to incumbent Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.

Shea and Carroll Get Personal, Attack My Armenian Heritage

In their responses to the grounds for recall, unelected Mayor Shea and Councilmember Carroll chose to ignore the stated grounds altogether. They chose to ignore the long history summarized above and chose to ignore the massive developer influence that put them into their unelected offices. They chose, instead, to attack me and my intentions. On top of that, they attacked my Armenian heritage, by spelling out my full first, middle and last names in their responses in a highlight of my non-Anglo-Saxon name, which I presume their xenophobic nature thinks should be highlighted. The use of a full non-Anglo-Saxon name is reminiscent of the racist birther attacks that used the full name of President Barack Obama. They may as well put “unwanted immigrant” before my name, remaining consistent with their other intolerant views. I am proud of my full name, Kevork Nazar Abazajian. Kevork is Armenian for George, and Nazar refers to Nazareth, the town where Jesus grew up.

I am a proud Armenian-American. I was baptized at the Armenian Etchmiadzin Cathedral, the oldest cathedral in the world, originally built in 301 AD when Armenia adopted Christianity. My Armenian family was split between Soviet Armenia and the United States, and we all eventually reunited in America for the freedom and democracy we enjoy. My family left the Soviet Union effectively as political refugees when I was five years old. Now, I treasure being able to participate in our free political process.

I became “Kev” Abazajian growing up in Texas, and it has stuck since. I became Dr. Kev Abazajian when I earned a Ph.D in astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego in 2001. I am now a full Professor at the University of California, Irvine and Director of the Center for Cosmology.

Shea and Carroll Must Go

The leading reason why Shea and Carroll must be relieved of their official duties is their beholden status to a developer. They are trying to move 125 acres of protected green space set aside for Orange County veterans as a Veterans Cemetery to instead be the property of the developer FivePoint. They admit to the moves away from the planned ARDA-site Veterans Cemetery to be a diversion tactic that will allow for FivePoint to develop that area into department stores and office space, a massive boon for its bottom line. In return, they are certain to get up to 25 times the amount they can raise on their own for their election campaigns, provided on their behalf by the developers they benefit, as former Mayor Don Wagner had done before them.

On top of all of that, the distortion of our democracy by developer interests has put into place officials who do not represent our City’s core values. Irvine is an inclusive, innovative and forward-thinking community that values the diverse perspectives and backgrounds that comprise this city. It values education, with excellent schools from the pre-school level to our top University of California campus. It values preserving our environment by protecting open spaces and moving to make our community and our planet sustainable. We know that climate change has come to a tipping point and bold action must be taken at every level, including at our City level.

We need leadership not paid for by developer interests. We need leadership that is not homophobic, xenophobic, anti-immigrant and against strong climate action. We need a City Council that reflects our community’s priorities of inclusion and protection of our environment. And, removal of corrupt, unrepresentative, unelected officials cannot be done soon enough. That is why Shea and Carroll must be recalled and removed from office.

Together, we will recall them and then vote for the representation that represents our values. This is what democracy and freedom looks like. Please join your community in signing the recall petition, knocking on doors and join your fellow neighbors in saying our freedom matters, democracy matters, we matter.