Irvine City Council members’ office budgets have doubled over the past five years as city staff recently warned them they could be facing a multimillion dollar budget deficit in the next couple years without changes.
Read: Irvine’s Budget Deficit Could Lead to Parking Fees and No New Libraries
Council members’ office budgets have gone from roughly $300,000 apiece a decade ago to over $600,000 each – higher levels than OC’s other two big cities of Anaheim and Santa Ana.
The doubled budgets come as city councilmembers’ responsibilities have shrunk, opening questions from a slate of former mayors on why they each need to manage over half a million dollars as part time elected officials.
Former Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan sent a letter questioning the expense on June 9, noting former mayors Christina Shea, Sally Anne Sheridan and Sukhee Kang, who’s also running for city council, had questions as well.
“This is not about politics,” reads Khan’s letter. “This is about stewardship. Every dollar spent on an oversized staff, on redundant offices, on vanity and personal projects, that is a dollar taken from Irvine’s parks, its seniors, its families, and its future. This is money is not for your use.”
To read a copy of the letter, click here.
Now, several council members are also questioning if it’s time to cut back their budgets, while others are pitching making their own positions as elected officials full-time offices with six figure salaries.
Councilmembers Assert Greater Control Over Funds
From 2006 and on, Irvine City Council members had very little control over their own budgets.
Each council member had a budget of $80,000 that went entirely toward hiring staff and another $10,000 to use on grants for local nonprofits, while the city manager handled their office supplies and any travel expenses.
But that changed in 2021 after complaints arose around Councilman Mike Carroll’s decision to forgo hiring staff and instead use his funds to send out mailers to his residents advertising city events, a move one of his colleagues claimed effectively served as a campaign advertisement.
[Read: Irvine City Council Approves Councilman Mike Carroll’s Mailer Spending Despite City Policy Violation]
City council members at the time voted against penalizing Carroll, instead voting in January 2021 to remove the city manager’s oversight and let each council member use a fund of around $100,000 apiece as they saw fit, with then interim City Manager Marianna Marysheva saying it was a step toward transparency.
[Read: Irvine City Council Changes Budget Policies Following Mailer Spending Controversy
“The only thing that’s changing is right now all the council budgets are under the city manager’s umbrella so it becomes this big pot,” Marysheva said in a 2021 interview. “There’s no accountability in that, and there’s no transparency.”
“You can request what a particular council member is spending easily (under the new system), and right now it’s not,” she continued. “It’s going to make it easier for everyone involved, especially the taxpayers.”
Spending by City Council Skyrockets as Responsibilities Shrink
From 2016 to 2021, total expenses on the city council stayed relatively stable at around $1.5 million, or approximately $300,000 between each of the five city council members for their own salaries, benefits, a staff member, travel and office expenses.
But after 2021, the funds swelled, and by the 2022-23 fiscal year each council member was receiving over $416,000.
As those funds grew, the total number of council members jumped from five to seven as the city transitioned to district elections in 2024, meaning council members now represented a smaller chunk of the city while residents still elected an at-large mayor.
[Read: Irvine Voters to Decide on Changing City’s Election System]
The biggest increases came to the councils’ staff budget, which went from roughly $80,000 in 2021 per year to $325,000 per council member, with $350,000 for the mayor.
That doesn’t count benefits, which also are now costing the city roughly $1.3 million a year for the council’s staff as a whole.
Around 85% of those funds are budgeted for the council staff and their benefits, according to a budget breakdown from the city, which is roughly $3.6 million a year for the entire council.
The remaining funds go to the council members’ own pay, auto allowance, office supplies, grants and training.
Last year, all six council members received over $607,000 apiece, while Mayor Larry Agran received over $643,000, for a grand total of nearly $4.3 million, meaning the overall budget roughly tripled in six years.
Anaheim, which has roughly 22,000 more residents than Irvine and the same number of city council members, spends a total of $1.9 million on their entire city council, or roughly $273,000 per council member.
Santa Ana, which has a couple thousand less residents than Irvine, spends just over $1 million on their city council according to the budget, or roughly $151,000 per council member.
Around $420,000 of that goes to the council’s staff, according to Santa Ana city spokesperson Paul Eakins, or roughly $60,000 per council member.
Who Gets To Work Full Time For City Council?
Each council member has the full power to choose whoever they want for their staff, and their picks are often well-connected political figures or campaign consultants.
Agran alone spent over $517,000 on salaries for his office, including a chief of staff, three full-time assistants and three more part-time assistants.
Scotty Hong, one of those assistants, received at least $5,000 for consulting on Agran’s 2024 mayoral campaign, according to campaign disclosures.
Councilwoman Kathleen Treseder was in second place at over $477,000 with three full-time staff members.
Councilwoman Melinda Liu spent over $474,000 in spending on staff, including her chief of staff and two full time staff, and two part time staff.
Evette Kim, Liu’s chief of staff, was also previously the chief of staff for former Irvine Councilwoman Tammy Kim.
Councilman William Go spent over $429,000 on his staff of five, only one of which is full time.
His full-time chief of staff is Manuel Chavez, a Costa Mesa city councilman.
Councilman James Mai spent $364,000 on a staff of four, three of which are full time.
Mai’s chief of staff, Steven Alves, donated $200 to Mai’s 2024 campaign and lists himself as vice chair of the Greater Irvine Republicans club on his LinkedIn, as well as a delegate for the California Republican Party.
Councilman Mike Carroll spent around $362,000 on his staff of five, three of whom are full time.
Andrew Di Giovanna, one of Carroll’s senior assistants, was chair-elect of the North Orange County Chamber of Commerce and a former staff member of the OC Power Authority – an agency Carroll helped launch before later calling for its shuttering – according to Di Giovanna’s LinkedIn.
Councilwoman Betty Martinez-Franco spent the least of her budget on staff ,according to city records, disclosing just over $251,000 spent on two full-time staff members along with one part-timer in 2025 after her election in April of that year.
Matt Miller, her chief of staff, was once a campaign staffer for Democratic State Senator Tom Umberg and has worked as a campaign consultant for most of the last decade, according to his LinkedIn page.
He also received at least $2,000 for consulting on her 2025 campaign according to campaign disclosures.
Council Members Question Their Own Expenses
While council members’ budgets ballooned, a bigger problem was brewing in the shadows – a structural imbalance between the city’s income and its spending.
That imbalance broke into view earlier this year just weeks before City Manager Sean Crumby retired, notifying city leaders on his way out that the city overspent by $6 million this year and were on track to face eight figure annual deficits by the end of the decade.
[Read: Irvine Officials Deadlock on How to Close Multimillion Dollar Budget Deficits]
That’s leading to questions on how major projects in the Great Park will be funded, along with questions for the future of the city’s newly launched library system and other initiatives city leaders have begun.
Now, some council members are questioning if it’s time to take another look at their office spending.
Councilmembers Kathleen Treseder and James Mai said they were unaware of the $607,000 figure until recently, because the budgets they were shown before did not account for benefits or other costs that were not under their control.
Both said they’d be open to cutting back on costs, but said the need for staff is there.
“We’re pretty spread thin,” Mai said. “You need at least one or two people full time … I don’t think it should grow anymore, I think we could even scale back.”
Treseder said she’s already given up her council stipend and insurance, and that if they’re asking other departments to make cuts they need to as well.
“Bottom line is everybody needs to cut spending as much as possible,” Treseder said. “I’m definitely willing to do that for my part.”
Councilwoman Betty Martinez-Franco pitched having the city take back over handling supply purchases instead of council members, and said that while it was “possible” to cut some funding the staff were needed to keep things moving forward and they should be paid well.
“We have staff members who have to work from seven in the morning to midnight, weekends,” Martinez-Franco said. “People may be thinking 40 hours but they work more like 60.”
Council members William Go, Mike Carroll, and Melinda Liu did not respond to requests for comment.
Mayor Larry Agran said that while he was open to looking at changing what council members received, he thinks he deploys his own staff in a useful way and encouraged city council members to focus exclusively on their district’s voters.
“We need to look at how the support of council office budgets is being deployed,” Agran said. “Are they deploying those dollars in addressing constituent and district issues, or is a lot of it being spent in a more general way citywide on behalf of individual council members.”
He also noted there has been “some discussion” on increasing city council pay, pointing to other cities like Sacramento, which pays its council members and mayor over $100,000 apiece.
“We’ve evolved over time as the city has grown,” Agran said. “The demands are greater now than they’ve ever been and yet the pay hasn’t changed.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.
