Video Interview: Irvine Mayor Beth Krom (part 1)
conducted by Jim Washburn
Remember Disneyland's Carousel of Progress, and how you'd exit past a miniature mockup of the city of the future, with perfectly laid-out streets and manicured parks? If Irvine would just get a monorail it would be that city.
Unlike other haphazard burgs, Irvine is a planned community. Where once the Irvine Company presided over grazing lands and bean fields, step by careful step a city was built, with a university, walled communities, entertainment/shopping hubs, business parks, park parks, nature preserves and other amenities, still presided over by the Irvine Company. One thing you have to say for the company: it's in for the long haul. Its chunk of California—originally 94,000 acres—was forged from Mexican and Spanish land grant properties in 1864, and it will probably still be making money off its properties in 2264.
I prefer cities where you can have a tire swing in your tree without the community association issuing a fatwa, but that neatness and planning has advantages. Irvine's city government has ample tax revenue and is largely unburdened by the crumbling infrastructure problems plaguing other cities.
City officials could well be complacent, but instead have taken progressive approaches to addressing affordable housing, mass transportation needs, and other issues cities typically avoid until they've reached crisis mode. Irvine has more affordable housing units than most cities and under Mayor Beth Krom has made plans for 9,700 more affordable homes and apartments to be built over the next 20 years.
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So it came as a shock last year when the Southern California Association of Governments—that's right, SCAG—ordained that Irvine must build 21,000 affordable units by 2014, part of some 35,600 units total it has mandated. (You can read much more about this in Glenn Hayes' FourStory article.) It's astonishing that, when development is already straining Southern California's water, power, waste and transportation resources, there's a state entity decreeing that cities must plan so much more construction; more astonishing still that Irvine, which has already done more than its share, is so encumbered. With only 6% of the county's land and 8% of its population, they are told they must provide 43% of the new housing.
Irvine Mayor
Beth Krom
Mayor Krom is none too pleased about this, and talks about its lawsuit with SCAG and other housing and transportation matters with FourStory in the first part of our interview here. (The second part is here.)
Motivated by her opposition to the then-planned El Toro Airport, Krom first ran for, and won, a city council seat in 2000. She was elected mayor in 2004 and handily won a second term with nearly 60% of the vote. It's not a gig for the thin-skinned. It doesn't take long on the web to come across sites claiming she's part of a "corrupt crony machine" or where her image is photo-shopped over Chairman Mao's on a Red Chinese poster. Perhaps that's just their way of saying she's a Democrat.
At least an order of magnitude more news coverage.