Ury Attacks Residents – Again

During the Oct. 1 city council meeting, Councilman Frank Ury lashed out at residents. It happened during Agenda Item No. 24, Status of Kaleidoscope’s Signage Proposal(s).

The discussion was spawned by City Hall to deal with residents’ complaints about a developer’s proposal for electronic billboards on the Kaleidoscope building. Residents are also concerned about a proposed signage plan that would allow jumbotron-style billboards along the freeway between Avery Pkwy and La Paz Rd.

Several months ago, a member of the conservative organization SOC912 began raising awareness of the billboards ( http://www.missionviejoca.org/html/buzz21.html ). Another member of the group created a website,  http://stopthetackylights.com/ . She collected signatures on a petition against the billboards and made public comments during a council meeting. She spread the word by creating a flyer to alert neighbors near the proposed billboard sites. The flyers directed residents to go to the website for information and to get involved.

Ury’s assessment during the Oct. 1 council meeting: “Cowards!” Why was he so upset? He said the flyers didn’t include a campaign number. However, issue-oriented flyers are covered by First Amendment rights, and the organizer created a website, not a campaign. The flyers revealed Frank Ury and Wendy Bucknum have accepted donations from the billboard developer. Ury doesn’t like residents to be informed prior to an election that he’s selling his votes.

City Hall has a stranglehold on newspapers – the OC Register and Saddleback Valley News. Several years ago, activists intercepted emails from City Manager Dennis Wilberg revealing he pressured OCR and SVN’s editors to cease publishing unfavorable reports about City Hall. An investigative reporter who dared to expose Easelgate was transferred to another city. Since that time, letters to the editor about local issues in Mission Viejo don’t appear in OCR or SVN. Instead of risking banishment for writing news articles, reporters put their names on fluff written by city staffers.

City Hall controls what is written in newspapers by threatening to withhold advertising dollars. However, blogs and flyers continue informing residents, and City Hall can’t stand it. The billboard flyers did more than raise awareness of what is coming. They exposed Frank Ury and Wendy Bucknum for championing the billboards as highly desirable and “progressive.”

Ury claimed during the Oct. 1 meeting that he puts his campaign number on his flyers. He’s required to do so as a political candidate, but does he obey the law?

When Ury was still in favor with the Republican Party several years ago, he was supposed to organize volunteers to walk precincts with the Party’s literature. Volunteers reported they had instead been hoodwinked into campaigning for Ury, who was running for a council seat. Here’s what one of them told this blog:

“I received a mysterious call prior to the election, asking me to help the Republican Party. The anonymous caller gave no information except the instruction to show up at an address on a Saturday morning. When I got there, Ury was in charge. I think the person who called me was his wife. The come-on was to hand out literature for the Republican Party, but Ury was trying to get us to walk his flyers, which we would not do. I wasn’t voting for him, and I didn’t like the deception. I did take a sample of his flyer because I saw it had no campaign number on it or who paid for it, as a candidate is required to state.”

The real cowards are in City Hall. The council discussion on Oct. 1 revealed the discussions about electronic billboards are proceeding behind closed doors with the city staff talking with the billboard proposers – Ury and Bucknum’s campaign financiers.

 If City Hall intended to lull the residents back into complacency, the plan backfired.