Ayn Craciun, a paid “climate action” lobbyist and candidate for Irvine City Council, will have to quit the city’s Sustainability Commission – thanks to a unanimous vote at the September 10 Irvine City Council meeting that strengthened Irvine’s ethic law by barring in-house lobbyists from serving on city commissions and committees.
Even Craciun’s political patroness, Councilmember Kathleen Treseder, voted for it – while cattily taking digs at the reform’s author, Councilman Mike Carroll.
Carroll is seeking re-election in November. Craciun is running to replace him and serve as the vengeful Treseder’s wing-woman on the council dais.
The new lobbying ordinance was finalized by the city council last night.
Craciun has been able to run the Sustainability Commission thanks to a loophole created by divergent language in the city’s Ethics Ordinance (adopted by the city council in 2006) and Measure H (the “Ethical Public Service Ordinance” passed by Irvine voters in 2008).
As City Attorney Jeffrey Melching painstakingly and repeatedly explained to Councilmember Tammy Kim during the September 10 meeting, the city’s ethics laws, as written, permitted “an [Irvine] elected official or a CEA [council executive assistant) to lobby the city of Irvine.”
Carroll’s amendment would take that away, so that city law would prohibit Irvine councilmembers, council executive assistants, and members of city commissions and committees, from lobbying the city of Irvine.
Craciun is the paid policy director for Climate Action Campaign OC. She lobbies Orange County municipalities to adopt ordinances and policies in line with her group’s brand of environmental extremism. Put another way: she’s a lobbyist and has been using her perch on the city’s Sustainability Commission to lobby the city on behalf of her employer.
That would seem contrary to the spirit of Treseder’s moralistic crusade for a stringent lobbying ordinance. Her protege Craciun was exploiting a loophole in the city’s ethics laws. Councilman Carroll’s amendment closes that loophole and levels the playing field in terms of Irvine’s prohibition on city councilmembers and their appointees being lobbyists.
Treseder could hardly oppose Carroll’s motion without seeming like a complete hypocrite. So, she went along, sniping at Carroll all the way.
Fast forward to the next council meeting on September 24, when the council would vote to finalize the ordinance Treseder, a university professor, had carefully crafted to shine a light on all those nefarious corporate lobbyists.
Sometime during the intervening two weeks, it dawned on Treseder that her definition of “in-house lobbyist” also applied to union officials lobbying city officials. Or maybe her union donors alerted her.
Either way, Treseder wasn’t going to let that mistake go uncorrected. Transparency is all well and good as long as it is restricted to the business community. In Treseder’s mind, union officials ought to go on lobbying Irvine officials like herself in secrecy, out of public view.
Treseder basically claimed she was duped into voting for Carroll’s “gross” amendment closing that loophole in the city’s lobbying law. She acted as if it were a deceptive “net” that Carroll laid to ensnare union lobbyists.
It was clear Treseder was upset and embarrassed that she really didn’t understand Councilman Carroll’s amendment. She led her comments with more gratuitous passive-aggressive swiping at Carroll – who was absent: “It’s hard for me know to anybody’s intentions for sure, but it did appear that Councilmember Carroll made this amendment to try to hurt his political opponent [Craciun].”
“I do think that is gross, and not what we should do from the dais,” Treseder preened, apparently oblivious that her motivation for pushing her lobbyist ordinance is to pay back, from the dais, lobbyists she views as political opponents. Self-awareness isn’t generally a strong-suit of fanatics.
Treseder then laid out her rationale for wanting to exempt union lobbying from her lobbying ordinance.
One of the “consequences” of Carroll’s amendment to “come up” that Councilmember Carroll “captured in his net, there” are “people who may work for unions as their representatives who will normally reaching out to councilmembers.”
“In my mind, that was not the intention of the amendment when I voted for it,” she said, spotlighting herself as the sole councilmember who failed to grasp that an in-house lobbyist, regardless of whether they work for a business, a non-profit or a union.
The high-mindedness of her September 10 vote to force her political protege Ayn Craciun off the Sustainability Commission vanished. Now the interests of political allis with real clout and influence was on the line, and Treseder wasn’t about to allow hypocrisy to stand in the way of changing her own ordinance to suit the interests of her special interests.
“And so I would like to revise it so that union members would be exempt from this restriction,” she said, and then moved to add this language stating the city’s ordinance governing in-house lobbying “shall not be applicable to lobbying by an in-house employee on behalf of a labor union.”
Treseder didn’t even bother to justify why she thought union lobbyists shouldn’t have to follow the city’s lobbying laws. Maybe, being a left-wing professor, she thought it was self-evident and no explanation was owed to mere voters.
The only other councilmembers at the meeting with Tammy Kim and Larry Agran, two Democrats with union ties, who unsurprisingly supported Treseder’s union water-carrying. They too chose the better part of hypocrisy and voted to exempt in-house union lobbyists from city laws governing in-house lobbying.
Lesson for Ayn Craciun: to paraphrase George Orwell’s Animal House, some lobbyists are more equal than others.
