OASIS not big enough anyway
Published Sept. 16, 2010
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
By FRANK MICKADEIT
The Newport Beach City Council spun it as a celebration of the life and career of civic leader Evelyn Hart , but it also was a celebration of a flock of cranky buzzards who got their way and won't have to abide frequenting something called the Evelyn Hart OASIS Senior Center.
The council late Tuesday voted to merely name the events building at the new senior center – not the whole center – after Hart, although the center probably wouldn't exist were it not for her fundraising.
Leslie Daigle and Ed Selich were for naming the whole shebang for Hart. Any prior indication by the media, myself included, that Mayor Keith Curry and Councilwoman Nancy Gardner were also poised to vote that way was clearly in error, because they supported the C.O.B. (Cranky Old Buzzard) ticket, along with Michael Henn , Steve Rosansky and Don Webb . (The official vote was 7-0 for naming just the building after Hart; naming the center for her was nicely engineered so it never came to a vote.) As Curry said, it is the media's role to be "provocative" (and, by implication, not well-reasoned), while "the art of governing," he said, "is to build consensus."
Though relieved of such high-minded duty myself, I will provocatively point out that some pretty fair veterans of the governing class, including the grand dame of Newport politics, Sen. Marian Bergeson (hobbling into Council Chambers on a knee she's having replaced), and former Assemblywoman Marilyn Brewer showed up to urge naming the whole center for Hart. "She retired from the City Council, but she never retired from Newport Beach," Brewer pointed out.
As for me, this provocateur has moved on. The senior center was small potatoes. I'll be pleased to cover my betters as they legislate all variety of important matters at the Evelyn Hart City Hall of Newport Beach, now under construction.
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