Is Lake Forest For Sale? Part 4—The Process

This is the fourth installment in our multi-part series on corruption in Lake Forest. In Part 1 we looked at the way in which money has influenced the voting patterns of city council members in the past. Part 2 showed just how expensive election campaigns have become, and how much money developers and real estate interests pay to have their candidates elected. Part 3 focused on two developers, who along with their businesses and associates, poured over $80,000 into the 2012 election to get their candidates elected. Today we examine the background to the project that the developers were pushing, and in our next article we’ll look at what happened when these same developers went to the council they helped elect, and asked for a favor.

Backdrop

Trumark, Brookfield, and their associates spent over $80,000 to get Adam Nick and Dwight Robinson elected. But their fingers were not merely in that pie. In the previous election they successfully supported Scott Voigts with $6,000+ and Peter Herzog with $1,250, making their total investment in  the elections of 4 of the 5 city council members nearly $90,000 (bearing in mind that this is the amount I could trace!). The only person on the city council who hadn’t benefited from their largesse was Kathy McCullough.

The Project

Brookfield proposed developing 151 attached homes on a 9 acre site comprised of the former Pontiac/Buick/GMC dealership. Trumark proposed developing 72 detached homes on the 7 acre site formerly home to Foothill Ranch Chevrolet.

The Process

As part of the planning process set out by the City, developers must jump through a series of hoops, prepare reports, appear before commissions, etc. Trumack began their formal process in September 2011 and Brookfield followed in October. At some point in 2012 the city requested “additional study items…including a market study and fiscal impact analysis”

One of the issues concerning the City was whether or not adding homes to those parcels was the best use of the land. Brookfield and Trumark’s study not only claimed that their homes were the best use of the land, but that their homes were the only viable use of the land (despite the fact that a thriving automotive business currently exists there).

Along these same lines, the City wondered whether or not the addition of 4,000 new homes already approved, most of which would be built in the areas adjacent to the Brookfield/Trumark site, would not greatly improve the commercial viability of the area, a glaring oversight in the material Brookfield/Trumark prepared.

So the City asked that the Brookfield/Trumark report be reviewed by an independent agent, and that the question of site viability be raised. Brookfield and Trumark agreed, gave the City $25,000 to cover the costs of the additional study, and the City recruited a firm to begin the work in September 2012.

The Snag

But then, for unspecified reasons, Brookfield and Trumark stopped the process.

A few months later, in December, they requested that they be allowed to proceed without the additional study. In addition, they asked that a council member be present during their discussions with city staff so that they didn’t “waste time”, requested that the discussions be taken out of closed sessions, and wanted the City to eliminate the “school mitigation agreement” that other developers were required to secure. These requests were, to say the least, out of the ordinary.

Nothing in the material they offered addressed the issues of (a) impact on the new traffic from their development on the neighborhood, (b) impact of the new traffic from their development on the City, (c) the impact of the newly approved 4,000 homes on the traffic and how this would interact with their proposed additions, and (d) the impact of the newly approved 4,000 homes on the future viability of the area for alternative commercial projects.

In response to the developers’ requests, the City held firm. The City wanted a “market demand study” to see whether the 4,000 new homes already approved would change the prospects for alternative development in the Brookfield/ Trumark parcels. The City argued convincingly that the developers hadn’t examined this issue, and that with 12,000 new people living in the area, the viability of future commercial projects must surely change.

The City also wanted a “fiscal impact study” to see whether or not the alternative uses would be better for the City. The developers’ analysis excluded alternative uses, and suggested that something (their project) was better than nothing, but the City rightly wanted to know if something else (the alternative uses not considered) was better than something. The City even asked whether or not the ratio of retail/commercial to residential space was imbalanced and might have “potentially long-term, detrimental effects on the City’s fiscal health.”

(This is the first time, as far as I can tell, that the City has stepped back, taken a breath and begun to consider the future problems associated with adding 15 percent to our City’s population).

Finally, the City noted that not only were these two new studies (“market demand” and “fiscal impact”) important to secure, the data submitted by the developers wasn’t up to date and wasn’t specific to our City. So the council was being asked to move forward with reports which were incomplete as well as insufficient.

Summary

So that’s the background to understanding what happened next. Let’s summarize –

• Elections in Lake Forest have become expensive, costing more than $60,000 to succeed.

• Apart from people’s own savings, the biggest slice of spending came from two developers, who spent nearly as much to elect Robinson and Nick as all the other candidates spent to elect themselves.

• As far as we know, neither Robinson nor Nick had any prior relationships with these developers, financially or socially, and the only relationship between them was the enormous amount of money the developers spent to get them elected.

• To move forward in their plans to develop two parcels and realize millions of dollars in profits, the multi-billion dollar developers reached a snag with the City. The City felt the developers’ studies were inadequate and wanted an independent review as well as additional information. This would cost $25,000 more (a pittance to companies with Billions of dollars of assets), but more importantly, would cause a delay, and even more importantly, might raise new issues which could undermine the entire project.

• The developers conceded the point to the City, paid the $25,000, and then, two months before the election, asked the city to postpone the study. No sooner was the ink dry on their request to postpone, then their pens were busy writing checks for more than $80,000 to get two new people elected to the Council.

• No sooner did their two candidates get elected, then the developers appeared before the city council (Dec 18), now with their two candidates seated, and asked that the prior agreement with the old council be reversed and they be allowed to proceed.

Hmmm.

Read this over just to be sure you see the timeline and the events.

In our next article, we’ll see what happened. Did their hand-picked candidates vote to give the developers what they wanted?