By Chris Quilter
In the next few years, our hometown will be debating and deciding some complex and thorny issues. What should we do about Laguna Canyon Road, a main artery and our most dangerous stretch of asphalt since forever? Can a large affordable housing project at the Congregational Church also be a good neighbor? How can we stay visitor-friendly without losing what everyone loves about Laguna to overuse injuries?
I don’t have the answers. That’s why I want our elected leaders to be smart, open-minded, respectful of their differences, and able to work through them to forge good outcomes for the entire community. Kempf, Rounaghi, Whalen, and Orgill are doing just that. Hallie Jones, a third-generation local, wants to join them and bring her considerable environmental chops with her. Given Whalen’s deep understanding of how our city works (and doesn’t), they both have my vote. All I can say about candidate Judie Mancuso is that her previous two attempts to win our favor failed badly. And then there’s George Weiss.
Weiss was deeply involved in the concerted effort to discredit past-city manager Shohreh Dupuis. He supported the Big Lie, repeated ad nauseam, that she was in the pocket of developer Mo Honarkar. One could say that with friends like that, Honarkar didn’t need enemies. But when his empire collapsed, the baseless charge of corruption—or as that mobile billboard parked around town put it: “Corruption?”—seemed more like racism than anything else. (BTW: Does Weiss know who paid for that billboard? Asking for a friend.)
Was Dupuis competent? Absolutely. Was she flawless? No. Did Weiss treat her with evident disdain from the dais? Often, even to the point of repeating the “some say” speculation that she wasn’t the victim of a hate crime, but slimed her own property in a play for sympathy. Aside from adding insult to injury, how smart was it to give Dupuis more ammo for a hostile workplace lawsuit? Weiss and his kangaroo courtiers could have dialed back the incessant invective and just let Dupuis finish out her contract. With Rounaghi and Orgill joining the council in 2022, it’s almost certain they would have looked around for a new city manager. Someone like Dave Kiff, perhaps? Instead, the taxpayers are out $450,000 that could have been put to good use.
Then there was Measure Q on the November, 2022 ballot. It was a complex land-use initiative co-authored by Weiss with several others who also had no expertise in complex land-use issues. After a great deal of wasted time and money, the voters crushed Measure Q by an almost two-to-one margin. Rather than see this defeat as an opportunity to look within, Weiss and his co-authors suggested that the electorate had been brainwashed.
Society benefits from leaders who are willing to speak truth to power. But Weiss’s many letters to the OC DA’s office—sent without the knowledge of his colleagues, City Manager, or the City Attorney he openly disparaged—led nowhere for lack of evidence, although other evidence did lead to Weiss being censured for violating the Brown Act, an historic first for Laguna. In the interest of transparency, Weiss should release all his correspondence with the DA, so voters can judge his suspicions for themselves. He also should throw in the police video when he was stopped for driving past traffic on his scooter in the middle lane of Laguna Canyon Road. That was the kind of moving violation that got Dupuis her fatal ticket. Weiss got a fist bump.
These examples and more explain why his peers never trusted him to be mayor, and why none of them have endorsed his bid for reelection. Instead, we see the once-vital Village Laguna lying on his behalf. So I’m issuing my second $1,000 challenge. (In 2022, I promised to donate $1,000 to Village Laguna if anyone could prove that the Council’s infamous closed session in June of 2021 violated the Brown Act. The offer died from neglect.) If anyone can prove Whalen and/or Kempf ever floated the absurd idea of replacing the Library with a parking structure, I will give $1,000 to the PAC funded by Alan Boinus and the Felders. They’re the ones behind those ugly, insulting Indy ads that try to turn Bob Whalen into a cartoon. He deserves better. We all do.
Chris Quilter is on the Emeritus Council at Laguna Beach Seniors.
