Irvine City News Editorial Board · September 21, 2026

Irvine is running out of runway. City staff told the council this year that the city overspent its budget by $6 million last fiscal year, is projecting a $9 million shortfall next year, and is bracing for a $37 million gap by 2027-28. Full-time staffing grew 28 percent under the previous city manager, from 856 positions to 1,103, and payroll costs have climbed roughly 50 percent since 2021. That is the backdrop against which District 5 voters should judge Betty Martinez-Franco’s first year and a half in office.

Faced with those numbers, the Council asked for something modest: a forensic audit to establish exactly where the money has gone before the council decides how to close the gap. The motion failed on a 3-3 tie. Martinez-Franco voted no, siding with Mayor Larry Agran and Councilmember Melinda Liu against the audit, while Treseder, James Mai and Go voted in favor. With a $37 million shortfall on the horizon, a councilmember’s vote against a basic accounting of where the money went is not a technicality. It is the whole ballgame. That vote combined with Martinez-Franco’s constant attempt to keep spending money is why Irvine City News cannot recommend a full term for Martinez-Franco this November. Irvine does not need to guess whether an inflation-driven deficit is manageable; it needs a line-by-line answer, and the councilmember representing District 5 chose not to ask for one.

Martinez-Franco won the seat in an April 2025 special election, defeating Anthony Kuo by a scant number of votes after the county Democratic Party’s endorsement shifted to her when an earlier favored candidate withdrew due to legal problems. Since taking office, she has also joined Liu and Treseder in asking city staff to study ranked choice voting for Irvine’s elections starting in 2028 — a structural change to how the city picks its leaders which will cost a huge sum or money, floated in the middle of the worst budget stretch in recent memory rather than after the books are in order. Some insiders believe that he vote was based on the belief that she knows she cannot be elected in a straight-up election. She has concerning ties to the Anaheim corruption scandal has been pushing to get an Anaheim-based company back in charge of the Amphitheater planning process. Moving to pay a consultant $20,000 per month who may or may not be working against the City’s interests is a deeply troubling pattern of behavior.

Taken together, it describes a councilmember whose priorities, when the city’s finances demanded scrutiny, ran toward a future election-system overhaul rather than toward opening the books on the current one. District 5 voters deciding whether that campaign has earned four more years should start with the audit vote, not the campaign literature. Irvine City News recommends that voters look elsewhere in the District 5 race this November. We will provide that endorsement in the next article.