As a brief diversion from the world-shaking events going on right now in Iran, I have a small tale of local politics. I have lived in Mission Viejo most of the past 37 years. I moved here in 1972 and opened my medical practice when this was a small new development, one of the first master-planned developments in the west. The Mission Viejo Company developed a portion of the family ranch into this city. The ranch extends from El Toro on the north to Camp Pendelton on the south, to the Cleveland National Forest on the east and the Santa Fe Railroad tracks on the west. Since the tracks run along the beach south of San Clemente, the ranch extends almost to the ocean. Originally, the ranch was twice as large and extended to Oceanside but in 1942 the owners donated/ sold the land to the Marine Corps for Camp Pendelton.
Mission Viejo prided itself on the planning that went into its city and there is considerable pride on the part of residents. About nine years ago, I got interested in local politics. The city council had been taken over by a small clique in the city and had begun to make decisions that did not follow the master plan. The first I became aware of this was when the planning commission decided to rezone some land that was planned for office buildings to multifamily residential. They were going to approve a 700 unit apartment complex in an area zoned commercial. The significance of this includes the requirement for services, such as schools, plus the volume of traffic and parking and even crime. Prior to that time there were very few apartments in the city. The residents were unhappy with the proposed zone change and I attended a planning commission meeting where the matter was to be considered. In an effort to avoid citizen involvement, the commission placed the matter last on their agenda and it was after midnight before the matter came up. They squelched comments and voted to approve the project in spite of local opposition. The residents, led by a small group of activists, took up a petition and got nearly 8,000 residents to sign it. The city ignored the petition and the residents wishes and the project was built.
Several years later, there was another controversy over the cost of a new city hall. The city council placed an item on the ballot with a low ball estimate of the cost and voters approved the project. Activists, and by this time I was starting to pay more attention, opposed the measure suggesting that the city hall project would cost far more than the estimate in the ballot measure and, sure enough, it turned out be almost twice the cost. Finally, in 2000, I joined a group called the Committee for Integrity in Government and we managed to oust the majority of the old city council in 2002. Some of that history is here although you won’t see that history on the official city web site.
We are now in an era where the traditional newspapers have less and less excuse for their existence. One of the remaining best excuses is local coverage of local issues and local government. The Orange County Register has done an excellent job over the years of doing so but that seems to be waning and it is a damned shame. Read this. We had a local reporter who was actually ferreting out some of the ugly little local stories.
The OC Register announced new staff assignments last week. For more than a year, reporter Lindsey Baguio covered Mission Viejo for the Register and Saddleback Valley News. She has been reassigned to Laguna Niguel.
In April 2008, Baguio exposed the city staff’s wasteful spending on 500 custom-built easels. She followed the city’s 20th anniversary spend-a-thon, which ended with easels thrown in a heap on a hillside. A city contractor took up to 200 of the easels to a county dump while city employees claimed the trashed easels were being “stored for future use.” City administrator Keith Rattay lied to Baguio – she quoted him – about costs and volunteer participation, and activists combed city records to expose the true figures. For a brief time, residents saw the real city hall through SVN coverage.
Baguio at first reported both sides – activists’ statements alongside city hall’s spin. But before the dust settled on Easelgate, City Manager Dennis Wilberg invited Baguio to his office. Baguio’s investigative reporting ended, and SVN published almost no letters about city hall after July 2008. Requests for public records revealed an email trail in which Wilberg pressured Baguio for favorable reporting. Records show he directed her to solicit community comments from a list of people he identified as supportive of his staff and how city hall spent taxpayer funds.
We finally get a local reporter who cares about these local issues and reports the facts. So what happens? The overstaffed and lazy city government calls her in for a “talk” and the reporting stops. This is why newspapers are dying, although on a very small scale. Still, this is where that reporter was learning her career and this is what she learned. What a shame.
The overstaffed and lazy city government…
Sounds like another criminal syndicate plying its trade.
It’s so simple — be aware of issues that affect your readers and cover them. That’s just meat-and-potatoes reporting. Yet so many newspapers fail to get it. They talk about it, but they don’t really believe it.
I’ll be forwarding this to my editors and colleagues as an object lesson of what to avoid.
Bradley, this is the local paper, I mean really local, that comes out weekly. The only reason people read it, especially in the era of Craig’s List, is for local sports scores and local news. The decline of the Register came with its loss of focus on local issues. Steve Greenhut was a big supporter of CIG eight years ago but that seems to have lost focus along with the rest. I get e-mails from them from time to time asking me to write letters to the editor. About what ? They have stopped covering local news.
Good afternoon Mike. Congratulations on the creation of your own blog.
As you surely will acknowledge to yuour readers, we fought side by side in the 2002 Revolution in Mission Viejo that ousted a well know mayor and mayor pro-tem. As a friend of Steve Greenhut we have covered many stories over the past decade. While he did devote a great deal of time covering Mission Viejo for the Register, he now has a wider scope of duties and responsibilites that preclude him from dedicating the same level of coverage of our city out of the 34 in Orange County.
You might also point out that prior to CIG disbanding Steve Greenhut was our invited guest speaker.
Sadly, print media investigative reporting has fallen by the wayside which opens the door for bloggers like yourself.
I linked to the missioviejoca piece over at the blog of John Temple, a former editor at the Rocky Mountain News. Temple claimed that advertiser influence over editorial content was a ” total crock.”
Delusional newspaper executives like that are a major part of the problem with journalism.