The Buzz Column, Sept. 12

Regarding the push for affordable apartments on top of retail stores at La Paz and Marguerite, where will children from the low-income families go to school? With Newhart well over capacity, is there room for a few more double-wides on the trailer-park campus? Reilly Elementary and Capo High School would also get their fair share of students from Mission Viejo’s newest welfare neighborhood.

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If voters allow Trish Kelley to hang around city hall for four more years, perhaps she would like her name on a building. Renaming Newhart to Trish Kelley Middle School would be a nice touch. If it’s true she was among council members advocating affordable apartments at La Paz and Marguerite during a closed-session meeting, it would be fitting to put Kelley’s name on the deteriorating school.

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While a lot of deplorable ideas have been promoted by Councilman Lance MacLean, his push for building high-density housing in Mission Viejo is among the worst. He champions “modernizing the Master Plan.” Translation: he sold his vote to UDR/Pacific and Steadfast to overturn commercial zones and bring in high-density housing with affordable units. As additional punishment for the residents, the city is being sued over one of the projects.

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The Long Beach City Council set the stage for growth and modernization in the late 1980s and overwhelmingly approved zoning changes. The Long Beach Police Dept. kept tabs for 10 years on a square mile where 600 homes were bulldozed to build 6,000 apartments. The per-capita income decreased 11.7 percent, the number of people living in poverty jumped 69 percent, and households on welfare rose 65 percent. The number of single-parent families nearly doubled, and the crime rate rose 44 percent. By the time the council realized its mistake and made a futile attempt at a building moratorium, the damage was done.

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Here’s a frequently asked question for Frank Ury’s candidate combo of Diane Greenwood and Justin McCusker. How will you pay to bury “all the power lines” in Mission Viejo? With estimates running into hundreds of millions of dollars, will city sales tax rise to, say, 50 percent? Both candidates also say they want to decrease power rates, so that’s quite a trick to spend hundreds of millions the city doesn’t have and put cash back into the pockets of its residents. Voters who were fooled by Ury’s campaign claim about burying the power lines should take a look skyward as a reminder.

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Neighbors living near Unisys report the vacant land purchased by Target is being graded. Although the housing part of the project is frozen in litigation, the lawsuit filed by Pacific Law Center against the city apparently has not affected the site intended for a Target store. Does anyone remember when a Target representative was at the public microphone talking about opening a store in October?

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Where’s that dang senior bus? Some senior citizens have been waiting on the porch for four years for Councilwoman Kelley’s phantom senior transportation program. In July she pushed through a $200,000 imaginary program, of which $100,000 will go toward a new city employee to manage a program that doesn’t exist. By the time they add administrative costs and amenities for the $100,000-a-year employee, the money will be gone.

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Councilwoman Kelley would have difficulty claiming any real accomplishments in her campaign literature. She’s done nothing for senior transportation, and the city foundation she was planning to claim as her pet project is a bomb. Her other proclaimed project, the expansion of the senior center, is a bazillion dollars over budget in the design phase – even before a contractor has been hired to start the city’s tradition of doubling construction costs. Kelley’s ballot statement says “reelect a proven leader.” Who would that be? With Kelley’s record, she should give the tiara back to Sherri Butterfield.