OC Register Survey -My Answers

While Newport Beach has a definite need for affordable senior and workforce housing, the free market has no reason to produce low-priced units in a high-price market.

That makes meeting our state’s goal to add the same fraction of low-cost housing everywhere especially challenging in the most desirable areas to live, such as Newport Beach.

So if making low-cost housing available everywhere is truly a societal goal, some form of government intervention is required.

Two possibilities are incentives to builders or subsidies to buyers/renters.

Of those, I would prefer rent subsidies, since builder incentives typically add large amounts and forms of development that would not otherwise be allowed.

But the subsidies should come from the state legislators for whom having the same priced housing everywhere is a goal, not from the cities on whom it is imposed.

In Newport Beach, as, I believe in every part of Orange County, water and sewer services are supported by enterprise funds (not all of which are city-operated) in which the costs are passed on to the users through the Proposition 218 process. So funding is, in a sense, automatic, but ratepayers have to trust their elected officials are not allowing unreasonable costs to be asked of them.

Preparing for future infrastructure needs is mostly a matter of the professional staff at the responsible agencies preparing a thoughtful master plans, with the elected officials who oversee the agency making sure that is happening.

The need for master plans applies to aging and future-needed roads, as well. But here, elected officials additionally need to ensure the city's general fund obligations are being supplemented to the maximum extent possible by state and federal grants and developer and visitor impact fees.

Newport Beach is blessed to have a large, stable and ever-growing property tax revenue base which has allowed the City to maintain quite healthy financial reserves while providing the expected services and working to pay down the unfunded debt liability that has accrued from the unsustainably generous employee pension offerings of the past.

Things can change, but I don’t see any immediate need to modify an approach that has been working well.

Newport Beach’s biggest immediate need is to satisfy the state it has implemented their large Regional Housing Needs Assessment allocation without losing our citizens’ right to continue to vote on future development increases via our 22-year-old “Greenlight” Charter provision. That may require having the political fortitude to forgo a vote on the RHNA-fulfilling plan.

But issues change, and the biggest ongoing need is for government that welcomes those who wish to participate and reaches out to those who don’t.

I would address that need by trying to convince my colleagues that in the 13 years I’ve been watching, Newport Beach has regressed rather than progressed in those areas, and needs to take corrective action. That would include such things as resuming resident surveys, moving council meetings back to an evening hour and increasing public comment time limits.

Whatever they may promise voters, it is unrealistic to expect any candidate to single-handedly solve a city’s issues. For if elected, they will not be its leader, but just one vote on a body that governs by collective action.

As the public’s elected watchdogs over the professional staff that runs the city day-to-day , good leadership skills are needed primarily to steer the other council members in what a candidate believes is the direction best serving the diverse interests of the city’s residents.

To discover that direction I would listen with openness to everyone, not just those who share my personal views.

I believe it is equally important to question whether city staff, in preparing the proposals that come before the council, has properly weighed those community interests and suggested policies that best address them. I would do my best to ensure every possible deficiency gets a full public airing.