We told you here that Assemblyman Jose Solorio (D-Santa Ana) had revealed the Legislature's Latino caucus will not block the state's sale of the Orange County Fairgrounds to Costa Mesa over displeasure with the City Council's “Rule of Law” proclamation and other moves intended to make those with brown skin feel unwelcome.
But another local member of the Latino caucus does still have a problem with the sale.
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“I ran into Sen. Lou Correa at the annual Beach Cities Friends
of the NRA dinner on Thursday and in kibitzing about the proposed sale
of the Fairgrounds off the record, finally got him to go on the record
with his 'serious concerns' about approving the deal,” Frank Mickadeit began a recent Orange County Register column.
The Santa Ana-based Democrat's opposition to the $96 million deal has nothing to do with immigration–“and everything to do with the Orange County taxpayer,” he reportedly tells Mickadeit.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger began the auction ball rolling by announcing his intention to sell off to the highest bidders valuable state assets to help erase at that time $20 billion (and now $19 billion) California budget deficit.
But, so far, the fairgrounds is the lone asset to get this close to being sold, and Correa does not think that is, uh, fair.
Why, he asks, should Orange Countians bear the brunt of a jewel like the OC Fair site being sold to help ease a deficit shared by all 58 California counties?
Correa also expresses fears to Mickadeit that the deal is not transparent enough and that the citizens of Costa Mesa will ever really own the
fairgrounds, that “it will get cut
and recut” by future councils and legislators.
By the way, if you're still stuck on the image of Correa and Mickadeit at an NRA dinner, which was held July 22 at Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley, the columnist notes that they “yakked so long, we struggled to claim the last of
300 seats.”
Pull!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.