Voice of OC (https://voiceofoc.org/tag/irvine-city-council/)
In-person voting has been cancelled for a special recall election in Westminster. It’s still up in the air whether Santa Ana’s special recall election will follow suit. Meanwhile, county elections officials will proceed to review a referendum movement against a controversial Santa Ana apartments project and a ballot initiative to relocate a planned Veteran’s Cemetery in Irvine.
Cities across Orange County cities are adopting bans on evictions due to the economic fallout from the state’s stay home order. To date, Santa Ana, Anaheim and Costa Mesa have adopted bans while cities like Irvine and Garden Grove have adopted softer consumer protections. Meanwhile, questions mount about what the bans will do to smaller property owners.
Buena Park, Fullerton and Irvine became the latest Orange County cities to declare states of emergency Tuesday in order to unlock state and federal emergency funding amid the novel Coronavirus outbreak.
Irvine City Council members voted to establish a new tax district in the Orange County Great Park on Tuesday night, expanding the total potential bond amount in the park neighborhoods to just over $1.1 billion.
While residents in the Great Park Neighborhoods are paying millions of dollars every year towards the development of infrastructure in the Park, many don’t know where their tax dollars are going.
While city officials have touted the Park as the most transparent project of its type, questions still remain about how public money is being spent to develop Orange County’s largest public works project.
Homeowners in Irvine’s Great Park neighborhoods are currently on the hook for over half a billion dollars in debt to build Orange County’s most iconic public works project, and the total cost for the project could come out at as much as $2 billion according to projections.
Irvine and Newport Beach officials started 2020 by pushing back against new state-mandates to zone for thousands of new homes, as California continues to grapple with a housing shortage.
Laguna Beach and Costa Mesa pushed back last week with resolutions opposing the expansion by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), as Irvine and Newport Beach gear up for similar votes Tuesday night.
City Manager John Russo could be fired at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting, with no reason stated publicly yet, according to one City Council member.