Only now, when long-awaited progress is being made at the Orange County Great Park, the result of a political shift at Irvine’s City Hall, do concerns over an audit of park finances, and the park’s role as a political tool, warrant intervention from Sacramento.

Despite two failed attempts to prod the state’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee to sign off on a state audit of the city’s Great Park audit, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, prevailed Tuesday when the Democratic-controlled panel finally concurred.

Ms. Gonzalez insinuated that politics determined the conclusions of the audit, pushed by the officially nonpartisan Irvine council’s current Republican majority, which criticized the years of park development managed by the council’s former Democratic majority.

The Democratic-controlled Legislature was nowhere in evidence while $200 million in development funds was spent, as the Register recently noted, to complete less than one-sixth of the project to convert the closed El Toro Marine Corps air base into a huge regional park. Neither was the Legislature’s interest piqued by Great Park audits conducted during the years of Democratic control, which found nothing amiss.

But if Ms. Gonzalez’s goal really was to determine whether politics played a hand in wasteful spending on the Great Park – by comparison, the current council has spent about $1.5 million on its audit – the examination’s findings made the answer abundantly clear.

Recall the testimony of Mike Ellzey, former Great Park CEO and current director of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, about when he questioned a $100,000-per-month public relations contract for the undeveloped park with Newport Beach-based firm Forde & Mollrich.

“We’ve got to reduce that. I mean, that’s way too much. We’ve got to reduce that,” Mr. Ellzey recalled telling two Great Park staffers in a sworn deposition to city-hired auditors last year.

“They literally laughed,” he recalled. “I asked them, ‘Why are you laughing?’”

Their reply? “Good luck on that.”

That moment is when, he said, the political nature of the park’s development under Irvine’s former council majority became clear for him. The staffers hired to implement the park’s master plan – which Mr. Ellzey said was a $42 million “waste” inconsistent with reality – weren’t calling the shots. Control belonged to powerful contractors and their political allies on Irvine’s Democratic-controlled council.

Those very contractors, according to a statement from the county’s Republican delegation to Sacramento, were exposed by the audit and “are now looking to get the Legislature to weigh in and protect them from those uncomfortable audit findings by changing or obfuscating the results.” One major contractor is San Diego-based Gafcon Inc., a Great Park project manager, that has been a financial supporter of Ms. Gonzalez.

It is inevitable that, when politicians are involved, politics will ensue. However, rather than a couple of Republican council members in Irvine, it seems that Ms. Gonzalez is the one who has played politics – successfully – with the Joint Legislative Audit Committee.

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/park-679961-audit-great.html