Since 1957 a vote of the people has decided who would be the Huntington Beach City Attorney. Since 1978 no incumbent holding that office has lost an election. Gail Hutton, who defeated incumbent city attorney Don Bonfa in the city election that year, easily remained in office until her retirement 24 years later in 2002.

Her replacement, Jennifer McGrath, was elected to the office next with 48.2 percent of the vote in a race against three opponents, but she ran unopposed in her 2006 reelection campaign.

Next November she will have one opponent listed on the ballot, T. Gabe Houston, who officially signed his candidate’s papers at the City Clerk’s office on Aug. 6, the last day to file.

Like other City Attorney challengers, Houston may also end up as election fodder. But his late entry reveals a serious flaw in the Huntington Beach City Charter—despite nine months of work by the City’s Charter Review Commission that recommend reforms—and exposes the hidden attempts (and not so hidden attempts) by various  members of the Huntington Beach City Council to gain political power by manipulating the reform process for better or worse.

Previously, the Voice showed how the council’s backroom political dramas have come to center stage at city council meetings. But recent e-mails obtained by the Voice give a sharper picture of the passion and acrimony flowing through the political veins of the city.

Some of the conflict centers on the office of City Attorney. One side wants the city attorney to be elected by vote of the people; the other side thinks that he or she should be appointed by the council or the City Administrator.

Related to that debate is the larger issue of how best to control the city’s budget when residents face severe cuts in essential services; specifically, how to take care of the city’s infrastructure shortfall and deal with public employee union pension costs that the city is obligated by contract to pay.

Houston’s last minute appearance at City Hall might have gone barely noticed if it had not followed a recent wave of discontent against McGrath stirred up by Chip Hanlon, publisher of Red County, the popular Republican blog, and city councilmember Devin Dwyer, over McGrath’s interpretation of Section 617 of the City Charter.

Click here to read the rest of this article.

Joe Shaw announced his candidacy for the Huntington Beach City Council on Oct. 24, 2009 at the home of former mayor and city council member Debbie Cook.  The OC Voice was there to record the event, joining a house full of supporters, including another former mayor/council member, Connie Boardman, League of Conservation Voters representative, Gus Ayer, HB city planning commissioner Blair Farley, who is also running for city council (with Shaw’s endorsement, and others. Shaw has lived in the city a relatively short time but wasted no time in getting involved in the thick of the city’s most important issues, starting as  a founding member of the Downtown Business District and providing the initial idea and inspiration for Surf City Nights, a Tuesday event (4-9 p.m.) that closes off downtown to auto traffic and offers a farmers market and a wide variety of street entertainers, a welcome change for HB residents who have avoided the beer mall atmosphere, complete with bull-riding, barfing drunks, brawling drunks, urinating drunks, and drunks who drive recklessly at high speeds through nearby residential areas (including, in full disclosure, right outside of this writer’s home on many occasions) that occurs generally after 9 p.m. every night, especially on weekends and during the summer. Shaw has also been an on (when not campaigning) and off-again columnist for the OC Voice. He also served as a city planning commissioner and currently serves on the city’s charter review committee. More information is available on his campaign website at: http://joeshawforhb.com/joeshawforhb/Issues.html

By Judie Mancuso
Special to the OC Voice

If you love dogs and cats, you are out of luck getting attention or protection for them from Orange County elected officials.

Since 2006, we have been working on statewide legislation to help curb the massive pet overpopulation problem in California. Our non-profit volunteer organization Social Compassion in Legislation (SCiL) works to help craft and lobby state legislation that will reduce pet euthanasia through increased licensing and spay and neuter.

California shelters see about one million dogs and cats coming through the front door every year, and they euthanize (kill) over 500,000 of them who were not lucky enough to be adopted or redeemed by their family. The cost to California taxpayers is a whopping $300 million dollars each year, and it is on the rise.

We receive support letters from every nook and cranny of the state for our legislation. Over 5,000 individuals and organizations have sent support letters just in the past few months for Senate Bill 250, the Pet Responsibility Act. Sponsored by SCiL and authored by Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez, the bill enacts a proven method to reduce shelter overpopulation.

Guess which area of the state has provided the most support for our bill? Right here at home, Orange County. Dogs and cats are a major part of life in the OC and pet lovers are not happy about the numbers killed in our shelters.

Even the OC Grand Jury got on board in 2008, releasing a 12 page report on spay and neuter laws. The report exposed Orange County’s animal overpopulation problem, pointing out that “animals brought to the County Shelter have less than a 50/50 chance of survival,” and that “the tragedy of euthanasia is the typical, not the occasional, situation.”

In response to our previous statewide spay and neuter bill, the Grand Jury concluded that “since all counties and most cities adopt their animal regulations from the California Codes, the proposed law would help ease Orange County’s animal overpopulation and reduce the operating cost of the County Animal Shelter.”

Thousands of cats and dogs killed neadlessly every year.

You would think that after such a comprehensive report OC elected officials would wake up and take a look at spay and neuter laws, right? Nope. The OC Board of Supervisors refuses to take a position. In fact, my OC Supervisor, Pat Bates won’t even take a call or a meeting on the issue.

OC’s so-called “fiscally responsible” state representatives in the Assembly and Senate won’t go near the legislation, even though tens of millions of dollars and countless pets will be saved statewide as shelter population would be reduced.

Why not? Personally, I think for OC Republicans it is easier to talk fiscal responsibility than to walk it. They say things like “the state has no business telling people what to do with their pets,” when California is already involved to the tune of $300 million dollars each year.

There’s one more piece to the puzzle: underground pet breeding. In California today, anyone selling more than two pets per year must obtain a seller’s permit and pay sales and income tax on the profits. And, most cities require breeders to get a business and kennel license. But as you might guess, virtually no backyard pet breeders follow these laws. There are thousands of underground breeders spread across California, cheating the state out of millions of tax dollars while producing excess animals that take homes away from pets awaiting adoption. Worse still, they dump their unsold “product” in our shelters.

In Sacramento, where SB 250 recently had a hearing, over 200 backyard breeders showed up to protest the bill. They feel that our law will bring scrutiny on their activities, and give animal control a tool to locate them and force them to comply with current law.

Underground breeders have even worked themselves up into a frenzy on blogs and chat rooms, convincing themselves in a bizarre echo chamber that spay and neuter laws don’t work and are actually meant to eliminate pets forever. Never mind that in the numerous jurisdictions with similar laws, including Santa Cruz and New York City, the only thing that has been eliminated is a large percentage of unnecessary euthanasia. There is a large body of proof that spay and neuter laws are effective by helping to prevent a large percentage of the homeless pets going from being put to death.

A statewide Zogby poll taken in 2008 found that “California voters are strongly in support of a law that would enforce the spaying and neutering of pets” and “voters are three times more likely to say they would vote for a legislator who supports a spaying and neutering bill than they would be to vote against him or her”.

The same poll found that 80 percent of the public are supportive of spay and neuter laws. “Even majorities of those groups that might be considered anti-regulation…say they are in support of such legislation.”
So why do the backyard pet breeders have the ear of our Republican representatives, instead of the good pet lovers supporting these laws? It may be that on issues they feel are controversial, the Republicans stick with the status quo because it’s easier.

There are glimmers of hope. Conservative Republicans in the Laguna Hills City Council have passed a resolution in support of SB 250, joining the bi-partisan army of cities and counties across California who has officially endorsed the bill.

So although I am not the first, let me add my voice to the large chorus of Orange County voters asking our State Legislators to step up to the plate and support life saving, money saving, spay and neuter laws like SB 250. This is not a partisan issue for OC citizens, and it should not be for our elected officials.

Editor’s note: SB 250 was recently defeated, but proponents are working to bring the bill back to the California State Assembly in January, 2010

Judie Mancuso is president of Social Compassion in Legislation based in Laguna Beach
For more information about SB 250 visit www.YESonSB250.com.