City Council: 'What goes around, comes around'

An old adage—“what goes around, comes around”—aptly describes actions on Yorba Linda's political scene, as past and present recall petitions, mayor selections and appointments to represent the city on county agency governing boards clearly demonstrate.

Shifting three-vote majorities on the City Council explain some of the teeter-totter votes that have many residents wondering if political payback represents the guiding principles of the city's elected leaders and a few of their ardent supporters, although participants claim their votes are solely motivated by the issues.

In 2012, opponents of the then-council majority (John Anderson, Nancy Rikel and Mark Schwing) launched a recall effort against Anderson, and this year, opponents of the new council majority (Gene Hernandez, Tom Lindsey and Craig Young) want to recall Lindsey and Young.

Anderson recall advocates, who also opposed the re-election of Rikel and Schwing in 2012, mounted the city's closest-to-success recall drive to date, but the 7,856 signatures they gathered came up short of the 8,668 needed to put the recall on a ballot.

(Petitioners said they checked signers against voter registration lists, but because they lacked the required numbers, city officials didn't initiate an official verification process.)

Three other recall efforts quickly died: two against John Gullixson (1993 and 1999) and a sputtering 2006 attempt against Allen Castellano, Ken Ryan, Keri Wilson and Jim Winder.

For much of this city's history, council members routinely rotated the mayor's chair among their colleagues on 5-0 votes, despite individual disagreements on issues, following a responsible example set by the first council 46 years ago.

But the Anderson-Rikel-Schwing council majority denied then-Mayor Pro Tem Jan Horton the mayoral slot on a 3-2 vote in 2008, making her the only council member to never serve as mayor, excepting Hernandez, the current mayor pro tem, elected to council just a year ago.

Now, Craig Young is serving a one-year term as mayor on a 3-2 vote, with Anderson and Schwing thinking it was Anderson's “turn” in the top position, although exactly when newly elected council members, such as Hernandez and Young, fit in a rotation has varied over the years.

(Rotations aren't seamless, since five council members are elected to four-year terms on a staggered basis—three in one election year and two in the next—and some don't run again and others are turned out by voters.)

Horton also was dumped as the city's representative on the Orange County Fire Authority board in 2008 by Schwing, the newly named mayor, and replaced with Nancy Rikel, a member of that year's council majority with Anderson and Schwing.

Now, Schwing has been dropped from his post as a toll roads director on a 3-2 vote and replaced with Young, a member of the current council's majority with Hernandez and Lindsey. Appointments are still made by the mayor but lately require council concurrence.