GOP 72nd A.D. candidates Joe Carchio and Matt Harper, Picture Courtesy of the Surf City Voice
Huntington Beach Mayor Joe Carchio and Council Member Matt Harper, who are both Republican candidates for the 72nd Assembly District, which includes part of West Santa Ana, are trying to eliminate a city commission – the Mobile Home Advisory Board (MHAB), according to the Surf City Voice.
If Carchio and Harper cannot get rid of the MHAB Commission, then they will try to eliminate “the at-large members whose current purpose is to provide a buffer between park owners and park residents and an independent look at the issues.”
Harper must have learned this from his former boss, Orange County Supervisor Janet Nguyen, who has been trying to eliminate community positions from the O.C. Caloptima board.
The Surf City Voice also revealed that Carchio and Harper have not been inviting local mobile home owners to MHAB meetings – or to meetings of the Intergovernmental Relations Committee (IRC) which has been reviewing all city run committees recently. But they did invite Vickie Talley, president of the Mobile Home Educational Trust (MHET) – and she doesn’t even reside in a mobile home! Needless to say, MHET has been a contributor to PACS that donated to the campaigns of both Carchio and Harper.
Santa Ana has quite a few mobile home owners – they should bear in mind what Carchio and Harper are up to and reject them both in the 2012 primary election for the 72nd A.D. Other candidates include Republican Tyler Diep, who is the Mayor Pro Tem in Westminster, and Joe Dovinh, the lone Democratic candidate. Dovinh owns a Vietnamese American newspaper.
On January 26, 2011, Councilmember Diep voted for Councilmember Ta’s motion to terminate the Cultural Arts Commission, Mobile Home Commission and Financial Review Committee (Item 9.1).
I guess that Republicans have it in for mobile home owners. Good thing that there is a Democrat in the race.
Why doesn’t the City of Santa Ana have a mobile home commission? Isn’t the Santa Ana City Council majority Democrat?
Why? Because the Usual Suspects and Dave Ream didn’t allow it. Now that they’re gone from power we can’t afford such a commission, since we are paying 25 million in annual pension benefits that Ream stuck us with.
None of Orange County’s Democratic controlled cities have a mobile home commission.
Do they even have mobile homes in Irvine?
Over 1000 Irvine residents live in mobile homes and Irvine’s City Council never created a mobile home commission. There are over 30 mobile home parks in Santa Ana and each Councilmember is unwilling to call for a mobile home commission. Where is the leadership in Santa Ana?
Irvine can pay for such a commission, but how do you propose we do that here?
Leadership, if the author really thought a mobile home commission was important for mobile home residents, he’d be asking Michele Martinez to propose one in Santa Ana before writing this blog post. Additionally, he would have asked his sponsor Tyler Diep to reinstate the mobile home commission he terminated earlier this year in Westminster. Maybe the author would have asked his advertizer Joseph Dovinh to ask his wife Dina to introduce a motion for a mobile home commission in Garden Grove. Something tells me the author has other motivations for why he’d single out Huntington Beach from Santa Ana, Garden Grove and Westminster…
You are focusing on hypothetical commissions that don’t exist. The problem is, specifically, as I posted – that Harper and Carchio are only working with the monied land owners, not with the mobile home owners. They don’t invite the mobile home owners to public meetings, they monkey with the Brown Act, and now they want to close down their existing mobile home commission.
The fact that such a commission does not exist in other cities underscores how important it is to keep THIS ONE. We cannot undo what Westminster did and asking Santa Ana to start a new commission when they can barely afford their current commissions is ridiculous. It should be noted that mobile home owners in Santa Ana can form neighborhood associations and work with the city in that manner.
All of this matters because Republican candidates Harper and Carchio want our votes, for the 72nd Assembly District, which includes part of west Santa Ana. Now we know how they feel about the poor families in their district.
I wrote the Dovinh campaign off their website at http://www.joedovinh.com/contact.asp. Here is thier response.
“Mobile homes provide affordable housing for many in the community especially seniors and may be the only opportunity for some to own a home. Decisions affecting these homes must allow the Mobile Home owners to have a voice in the process.
Each city has handled mobile home owners differently, but it is counterproductive to take away existing options for owners to have a voice.”
Yea, we have mobile homes in Irvine. They are called RVs. Hahahaha