After long nights spent boxing the state over local housing goals, Huntington Beach Mayor Tony Strickland goes home to a condo on Breezy Lane. 

It’s part of a residential community built in 1999, and there’s a reason that Strickland’s residing there has been of interest to his critics: 

It’s affordable housing.

Known as Cape Ann, the 146-unit development has an affordable housing covenant, according to the City of Huntington Beach.

Its income eligibility is listed as ‘moderate,’ with a price set not by market conditions, but by the city, to ensure buyers spend no more than a certain amount of their income toward their housing expenses.

While living there, Strickland and his Republican council colleagues have fought against state-mandated goals to increase the town’s housing stock, including affordable homes, through lawsuits and news conferences outside of City Hall.

Critics say the majority’s effort will threaten efforts to house people, but the majority says Sacramento’s unfairly burdened the city with unrealistic goals.

The city has been tasked with zoning for 13,368 new homes – over 5,800 of which have to be for very low income and low income families.

It’s a quota the city’s now fighting in court.

And against this backdrop, Strickland’s own home has come into focus. 

In a phone interview, Strickland acknowledged the affordable condo as his primary residence, after an online critic of Strickland and the council’s Republican majority, @LarryTenney, posted property and campaign records to Twitter showing the mayor’s listed address.

“I do live there,” said the 53-year-old whose address is also listed on his voter registration. “My wife, with her ex-husband, bought the home together in 2000. And when she and I got married, we agreed to put all our assets into a family trust … Her name’s on the mortgage.”

Twenty years ago, he said he would have supported a project like this, because “it fits within” his and other locals’ vision for a “suburban coastal community.”

“I just don’t want to urbanize Huntington Beach.”

Strickland calls the condo a source of security in the face of the unknown. 

“God forbid something happened to my wife – this whole thing goes to her children.”

It’s the same type of security – or the desire for it – that’s driven statewide outcry over a fundamental need: Homes, and cheaper ones, amidst a public camping and homeless crisis and sky-high coastal cost of living.

One tool to make inroads is state-mandated housing goals over eight-year cycles for local jurisdictions. They’re set by a regional governing board and there are penalties for not going along. The most recent and famous example: Builder’s Remedy.

But whether the housing gets built all depends on local zoning, which depends, in turn, on the political attitudes of a given City Council. 

And recent months have shown that Surf City is all about local control, questioning Sacramento’s process used for assigning the mandated number of homes for cities to build. 

As of last week, city officials and Attorney General Rob Bonta were suing each other as a result.

[Read: California’s Battle With Huntington Beach Over Housing Goals Heads To Court]

In February, Strickland and three of his council colleagues voted to direct the elected city attorney, Michael Gates, to challenge two state housing laws aimed at forcing local cities to allow granny flats on existing residential properties.

The next month: They voted to block the state penalty, Builder’s Remedy, for not complying with their share of regional housing construction goals. 

“There is a war on the automobile and there is a war on suburbia and they want to urbanize California,” Strickland said that night. 

He again made the contention over the phone on Wednesday.

“If people in Huntington Beach don’t want to live in a suburban community … they’d move to Los Angeles or San Francisco.”

Speaking into Strickland’s phone, his wife Carla said she bought the house for around $319,000 with $70,000 back in the year 2000.

She said their monthly impounded mortgage payments – which typically include insurance and property taxes –  fall around “$1,400.” With everything: “$2,300,”

After Strickland and his allied colleagues’ March 8 vote, Newsom in a Tweet called the move “selfish” – making “our homeless crisis worse.”

“The city has tried these antics before. They lost then and they will lose now.”

Then the state came down.

On March 9, Governor Gavin Newsom and other state leaders announced a against the city, over the council’s action regarding granny flats.

Later that day, Strickland stood alongside other leaders like Gates and announced their own lawsuit against the state to shut down affordable housing mandates altogether, claiming overreach by Sacramento and an infringement on local zoning authority.

“I wouldn’t be doing my job as mayor, as a councilman and as an individual if I didn’t push back on that,” Strickland said. “Because I do not believe that.”

This article was updated at 3:42 p.m. to clarify an error on Strickland’s quote about residents wanting to live in a suburban community and the price for which the home was purchased.

Noah Biesiada and Hosam Elattar contributed reporting to this story.

Voice of OC is Orange County's nonprofit newsroom. We rely on donations from people like you to sustain our news agency. Please make a contribution today: https://voiceofoc.org/donate

Huntington Beach City Council is expected to ramp up their fight against Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California housing department over state housing laws. 

On Tuesday, Surf City leaders are slated to discuss a new law that would ban new development imposed by state mandates Newsom and other state officials warned they will be sued if they move forward. 

The state law in question is called “builder’s remedy,” which allows developers to ignore zoning codes in order to build their projects but only if those 20% of the project’s units are affordable housing and if the city does not have a state approved housing plan.

[Read: Will Builder’s Remedy Create Housing Without Local Approval in Orange County?]

Most cities in Orange County don’t have approved housing plans, including Huntington Beach after the council rejected the city’s proposed housing plan at the end of last year.  

Huntington Beach’s proposal would stop any attempt at using builder’s remedy within the city, with council members arguing at their past meetings they should have the power to approve or deny projects. 

“The City of Huntington Beach is right to challenge these State housing mandates,” said Mayor Tony Strickland in a letter to state officials on Jan. 12. “We don’t need to hear a lecture from Governor Newsom. Gavin Newsom left San Francisco in shambles as Mayor and is doing the same thing to our state.”

The council is expected to discuss their proposed ban on builder’s remedy at tonight’s 6 p.m. city council meeting, which can be viewed here. 

Last year, Huntington Beach elected a new Republican city council majority – all of whom ran on a campaign of fighting the over 13,000 homes the city was assigned to zone for as part of the state’s housing goal.

[Read: Republicans on Track to Retake Huntington Beach City Council]

Meanwhile, state officials including Gov. Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta have called out Surf City officials and have warned them that the proposed ordinance banning builder’s remedy violates state law.

“I urge cities to take seriously their obligations under state housing laws. If you don’t, we will hold you accountable,” Bonta said in a news release last month.

The move to challenge the state has picked up concern from the Orange County Register’s Editorial Board. 

“Huntington Beach Mayor Tony Strickland has apparently forgotten that he no longer serves in the state Legislature given his plan to defy state laws,” the board wrote in an editorial on Mar. 1. “Strickland and his allies ought to spend more time tending to the city’s problems and less time pretending to be state legislators.”

While the council is set to approve a ban on builder’s remedy applications, there’s limited information on how they plan to do that.

As of Monday March 6, staff had no report prepared for the issue, with the city’s only discussion coming at a planning commission meeting on Valentines’ Day. 

Commission members recommended an amendment that would ban Builder’s Remedy in a 4-2 vote. 

Some planning commissioners pointed out that this was what voters asked for by electing a city council majority who ran on fighting mandated housing, and that by shooting back against state mandates, they were following the will of the voters. 

“The builder’s option is bullying by the state to either pass a housing plan that they’ll approve,” said Commissioner Butch Twining at the Feb. 14 meeting. “Or they’ll put their builder option on us and that’s what I don’t like.”

“I don’t want to see developers just come in here and build wherever they want, whatever they want.”

Others pointed out that the current proposal from city staff lacks many details, since the rules are just one page. 

“The City expressly prohibits the processing or approval of any application for a housing development project or any project not in conformance with the zoning and General Plan land use designation … regardless of the so-called “Builder’s Remedy,” staff wrote in the proposed rules. 

When commissioners tried to ask questions about it, they didn’t get very far. 

“In a hypothetical situation, when an application comes in does that mean the planning department is going to deny that application?” asked planning Commissioner Kayla Acosta-Galvan. 

“I don’t want to get into hypothetical situations,” said Mike Vigliotta, chief assistant city attorney. “When the ordinance is adopted we’ll implement it how we determine the ordinance should be implemented.”

Acosta-Galvan then asked about the history of lawsuits challenging builder’s remedy in California, a question Vigliotta declined to answer. 

“I’m not going to discuss lawsuits or the legal efficacy of the ordinance,” Vigliotta said. 

Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.

Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.

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The job is to serve as a civilian watchdog over the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and other powerful county law enforcement agencies – identifying systemic problems so they can be fixed.

But the new head of OC’s Office of Independent Review is drawing questions about his background in a neighboring county – and whether he’s committed to transparency in his new role.

Until his appointment to the OC watchdog role this October, Robert Faigin was the top lawyer for San Diego County’s sheriff for 21 years.

Two decades into his watch at the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, state auditors raised alarms last year about “the high rate of deaths in San Diego County’s jails compared to other counties,” citing failures to meet its constitutional duties to fix “systemic” problems.

Faigin said he was unavailable for an interview about his record in San Diego County and his vision for his new OC job.

His hiring to oversee the OC Sheriff’s Department has some police reform advocates on edge. 

Daisy Ramirez, a senior police advocate and organizer the ACLU of Southern California, said she has no confidence in Faigin. 

“If the office is going to be run by someone with the history that Robert Faigin has, what is the point?” said Ramirez.

“Oversight is only effective when people are willing to call out the injustices,” she added. “And Robert’s history shows that he has clearly taken the side of the sheriff.”

The OIR search that led to Faigin’s hiring was led by supervisors Andrew Do and Doug Chaffee, both of whom saw some of their biggest election campaign support from the sheriffs’ deputies’ union.

Chaffee told Voice of OC that Faigin’s role in OC is different from San Diego.

“In San Diego, Mr, Faigin worked for the Sheriff who was his client,” Chaffee told Voice of OC.

“In OC he will be working for the Board of Supervisors to help improve the procedures and practices of the departments he will review.”

Do didn’t return a message for comment.

Faigin is coming into the Office of Independent Review as the county Sheriff’s Department has faced numerous controversies over the past decade.

They include the jailhouse snitch scandal that caused at least half a dozen murder and attempted murder cases to fall apart, and an evidence booking scandal that caused criminal cases to be dropped against 67 people.

A Controversial History Under His Watch in San Diego

In a scathing report last year, state auditors found the San Diego County department failed to take action to fix known problems in following its constitutional duties in the jails – and that as a result, people likely died unnecessarily.

The state probe came at a time Faigin had been the department’s top legal advisor for about 20 years.

“The Sheriff’s Department has failed to adequately prevent and respond to the deaths of individuals in its custody,” state auditors wrote in their report.

“The high rate of deaths in San Diego County’s jails compared to other counties raises concerns about underlying systemic issues with the Sheriff’s Department’s policies and practices,” they added.

Auditors found inmates’ medical and mental health needs weren’t being met –  and San Diego Sheriff deputies did a poor job of visually checking on the health of incarcerated people.

“Furthermore, the Sheriff’s Department has not consistently taken meaningful action when such deaths have occurred.”

The auditors also found that an incident review panel Faigin was part of “has failed to provide effective, independent oversight of in‑custody deaths.”

That panel, they wrote, “also failed to investigate nearly one‑third of the deaths of incarcerated individuals in the past 15 years, which means that dozens of deaths have not been subject to a key form of review outside of the Sheriff’s Department.”

Faigin also has advocated for putting attorneys on police incident review panels so their discussions can be protected as secret under attorney-client privilege.

In at least one case, a judge found Faigin was wrong about that.

OC’s previous Office of Independent Review director, Sergio Perez, was known for engaging with the public and publicly issuing an investigation report in 2021 calling out “troubling cultural currents” in use of force training at the Sheriff’s Department.

He left last spring to become the first inspector general of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which had been embroiled in a high-profile bribery scandal.

How Transparent Should a Watchdog Be?

Vicente Sarmiento, the county’s newly sworn-in supervisor, has been vocal in supporting more resources for OIR and potentially adding a panel of citizens for civilian oversight of county law enforcement.

“I certainly think there is a role for the public to play in this,” said Sarmiento, who was opposed in the November election by hundreds of thousands in spending by the sheriff’s deputies union.

“For me, more disclosure is always better than less. So that’s the premise I begin with,” he added.

“So if it is more public reports, or access by the public [and] he public also having an opportunity themselves to make their own assessment – all of those things I’m going to consider.”

As for Faigin himself, who was hired before Sarmiento joined the board, Sarmiento said he hadn’t yet met with him and wants to “give him a fair chance to sit down and talk to me.”

Supervisor Don Wagner said Faigin was the best person who applied for the job.

“He is an outstanding candidate, the best in the pool of applicants we had,” Wagner told Voice of OC in a text message.

As for transparency concerns in San Diego, Wagner said Faigin won’t be touching those issues at the OC Sheriff’s Department.

“He won’t be handling PRA/transparency issues for the county,” Wagner said.

Wagner also said there needs to be more openness with the public about the Sheriffs’ Department.

“I’ve been clear that we should be more transparent,” Wagner said. “We shouldn’t look like we have something to hide when we have nothing to hide. That position won’t change no matter who sits at the top of the OIR.”

Jennifer Rojas, a policy advocate with the ACLU, says the supervisors’ choice of Faigin is the opposite of what’s needed for transparency.

“By hiring a former attorney for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, the OC Board of Supervisors shows they are more concerned with shielding law enforcement from liability, over the core tenants of civilian oversight: transparency and accountability,” Rojas said.

She questioned if Faigin can handle overseeing a department that’s been plagued by controversies over the years, like the jailhouse snitch scandal. 

“The OCSD and OCDA have been at the center of numerous scandals and OC residents deserve meaningful and effective oversight of the departments that receive over 50% of the county’s discretionary dollars.”

Perez’ 2021 report found that the OC Sheriff’s Department’s culture may be fueling deputy misconduct, harsh treatment toward people already in custody or in mental health crises, and a lack of internal probes into unauthorized use of force.

Excessive force claims have cost Orange County taxpayers over $13 million in payouts over the last decade, with total sheriff lawsuit payouts topping $40 million, a Voice of OC review of county payout data found.

Among the claims are multi-million-dollar payouts over shootings of unarmed people.

That includes not just payouts for excessive force allegations, but also on claims of deputies engaging in wrongful arrests, sexual assault, civil rights violations, malicious prosecution and injuring people after running red lights.

Perez is encouraging Faigin to issue public reports for transparency.

“The people of Orange County deserve a proactive OIR that works towards more transparency and accountability for its justice-related systems,” Perez said in a statement to Voice of OC.

“The only way to do that is with steady community engagement and honest public reports. I trust that Mr. Faigin will work towards those goals, and I hope the Board supports him and his staff.”

Nick Gerda covers county government for Voice of OC. You can contact him at ngerda@voiceofoc.org.

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Surf City leaders are looking at implementing a new housing plan as the council majority gears up to fight Sacramento over housing mandates. 

While the city has yet to pitch the plan to the state, there isn’t another one like it in California according to city staff, with the city zoning for 7,000 units less than the plan the state provisionally approved last year. 

It’s setting up a battle between Huntington Beach’s newly elected Republican majority city council and Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. 

The pushback on Sacramento started with a proposal by Councilman Casey McKeon in December to challenge the state mandate that the city zone for over 13,000 new units of housing, calling the goals “outrageous.”  

The California Dept. of Housing and Community Development told city leaders earlier this month that if they keep going this direction, there will be consequences.

“HCD will continue to monitor the City’s actions regarding the proposed ordinance, and if the City adopts an ordinance that violates state housing law, HCD will respond in order to remedy those violations,” wrote Melinda Coy. 

To read the letter, click here. 

[Read: Sacramento Warns Huntington Beach Against Violating State Housing Law]

Newsom lambasted the proposal last month.  

He said Huntington Beach is “another city where elected officials are resorting to cheap political stunts to avoid their responsibility to build desperately needed housing.  California’s housing crisis is real, and we need leaders who are serious about solving problems in their communities. It is time for the games to stop.”     

Despite the warning letter from the housing department, Huntington Beach leaders are showing no signs of slowing down. 

In response to the letter, Mayor Tony Strickland shot back at Newsom and doubled down on opposing the housing mandates.

“The City of Huntington Beach is right to challenge these State housing mandates,” Strickland said in his response. “We don’t need to hear a lecture from Governor Newsom. Gavin Newsom left San Francisco in shambles as Mayor and is doing the same thing to our state.”

During a study session at the council’s Tuesday night meeting, city staff introduced two options for the city council: move forward with the housing plan that already has provisional approval from the state, or a new plan that would zone for around 7,000 less units. 

Under the original plan, the city would zone for 20,000 units of new housing, leaving them a 7,000 unit buffer in case projects were to not meet the requirements for low and moderate income housing. 

But instead, council members directed staff to bring back a plan zoning for just over 13,000 units, the minimum required by the state, and keep the 7,000 buffer units out of the plan unless they ended up being necessary. 

“You could picture them in two separate buckets,” said Nicolle Aube, a senior administrative analyst who presented the plan to the council. “Sites would be reviewed to determine which site best picks up the lost zoning capacity.” 

But, Aube also said it wasn’t a sure thing that the state would approve the plan. 

The original plan “would be a more certain path toward compliance,” Aube said, adding that city staff thought the new plan is “viable and a legal option for compliance.” 

Spokespeople for the state housing department did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Voice of OC on whether the new plan would be approved. 

Councilmembers pushed forward with the new plan, adding that they wanted final say on which projects would come out of the buffer each time instead of leaving the job to city staff.

“If we have to certify a map, it should be the minimum amount of units,” said Councilman Casey McKeon. “We have sites identified, we can then rezone on the fly and go through the process with maximum oversight instead of rezoning those buffer sites now, which creates a lot of angst in the community.” 

Councilman Pat Burns asked why the city couldn’t just require developers to meet numbers for low income and moderate incoming housing with their projects, but staff claimed that could also get them into trouble with the state for impeding the project. 

“Well that’s a heck of a situation,” Burns said. “I can’t believe there’d be such hypocrisy in the state that they mandate something and it can’t be fulfilled.” 

In 2019, the state sued Huntington Beach over what they described as a failure to allow enough affordable homes to be built. The city agreed to settle the lawsuit in 2020.

The previous city council voted against going to court with the state over the mandated housing goals in 2021 with some council members worried of the cost.

The four newly elected Republican city council members all ran on a platform of challenging the state over the more than 13,000 housing units the city has been mandated to zone for.

“One of the biggest fights we have is pushing back against these 13,368 units,” McKeon said at last night’s meeting. “Our approach should be to focus on the minimum.”

Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.

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Voice of OC is Orange County's nonprofit newsroom. We rely on donations from people like you to sustain our news agency. Please make a contribution today: https://voiceofoc.org/donate

Orange County is facing another winter COVID-19 wave as positivity rates have steadily increased and hospitalizations tripled throughout November.

“I think it will be worse than the little wave we had in the summertime,” said Andrew Noymer, a UC Irvine public health expert and epidemiologist. 

In a Wednesday phone interview, Noymer said it’s nearly impossible to predict just how bad the current wave can get. 

“I don’t know. The second answer is I think it won’t be as bad as last winter – so it won’t be as bad as the Omicron wave that peaked in early January this year. It’s hard to predict these waves,” he said. 

It comes as residents throughout one of California’s largest counties prepare for the holiday season – a pattern seen in 2021 and 2020. 

“We have seen case rates increase pretty significantly and we know that continues to be an underreport because we don’t have an indication in all of the over the counter testing,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of the state’s Health and Human Services Agency, at an abrupt Tuesday news briefing.

Statewide, Ghaly said, there’s been a doubling of the positivity rate. 

While the Golden State sat at a 10.8% positivity rate, Orange County was higher at 12% as of Nov. 29 – the latest available data from the state.

At the beginning of November, OC had a 5% positivity rate. 

COVID hospitalizations are also increasing throughout the county, which nearly tripled throughout November. 

As of Tuesday, 359 people were hospitalized, including 48 residents in intensive care units, according to state data. 

That’s a significant increase from 125 people hospitalized, including 19 in ICUs on Nov. 1. 

Noymer said intensive care unit numbers are a benchmark of how bad the current wave is getting. 

Ghaly said California could be on track for a tough winter, noting trends are “fast approaching what we saw earlier this year with Omicron …. Roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of what we saw with the end of the year 2020 and beginning of 2021.” 

He also urged people to get the bivalent COVID vaccine, noting it helps prevent severe infection.

It comes as OC and California face a viral triple threat: steep rises in COVID, flu and RSV cases. 

RSV, or Respiratory Syncytial Virus, impacts children the most. 

Last month, the county’s Health Care Agency declared a state of emergency of RSV in an effort to allow the Children’s Hospital of Orange County to staff up quicker and access critical medications faster. 

The virus is a common respiratory virus that’s the most common cause of bronchitis and pneumonia for children less than a year old, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Ghaly said the multiple viruses floating around are weakening people’s immune systems and increasing their chances of severe illness because many are getting back-to-back infections. 

“The immune system is an amazing thing and it needs to recover itself and it can’t take on so many fights at the same time,” Ghaly said. 

He also noted that public health officials are seeing people with a combination of two or more viruses. 

“We’re seeing more and more people who are coinfected with more than one infection and they are indeed sicker and needing more care and stretched a little bit thinner than any of us would like,” Ghaly said. 

Noymer seconded Ghaly’s statement. 

“We’re seeing patterns that are consistent with that phenomenon, so yes,” he said. 

The 2020 winter wave was the deadliest COVID spike yet for OC and California. 

From Nov. 1, 2020 through March 31, 2021, nearly 3,600 Orange County residents were killed by COVID. 

The death impact was less during the same time from last year to earlier this year: 1,256 people died. 

Ghaly’s Tuesday media briefing marks a rare occurrence lately – public health officials hosting question sessions with the press corps. 

Locally, the Orange County Health Care Agency hasn’t held one since early August. 

Meanwhile, Ghaly noted the strain on hospital staffing. 

“We still are often stretched on staff. So the conversations we have with facilities is largely how we support having the staff needed to take care of individuals and that means finding ways to bring more staff in.”

Spencer Custodio is the civic editor. You can reach him at scustodio@voiceofoc.org. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerCustodio.

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The Los Angeles Angels Major League Baseball team is getting another, controversial multi-million-dollar taxpayer contract to promote mental health in Orange County.

Under the $9 million, three-year contract, the Angels will promote the county’s mental health website OC Navigator, provide 500 tickets to each Angels home game that’s sponsored under the contract, and make Rally Monkeys and bobbleheads with the website logo, among other services.

The contract was approved 3-1 on Tuesday, with Supervisor Katrina Foley objecting.

Foley cited the lack of measurements of whether the marketing efforts – which started in 2019 – have been effective.

“There’s no, really, way to know whether or not that is resulting in any access to resources and services,” she said.

Foley has been asking for that data for months.

She said “it’s really difficult to understand whether or not this significant investment from our Mental Health Services Act dollars is having on impacting that demographic that we’re trying to reach.”

“I really believe that the lack of any kind of a direct mail program, or a direct kind of contact with the demographic of individuals that we are trying to reach, is probably a weakness in this campaign,” she added.

No other supervisor, nor county staff, addressed Foley’s concerns, aside from Supervisor Lisa Bartlett saying they’re “very good points” that should be sorted out before the Angels’ contract comes up for renewal in three years.

County records about selecting the Angels do not indicate any other alternatives were explored for promoting the mental health website.

The effectiveness of the Angels campaign – as opposed to alternatives – has been called into question in the past by the chair of the county’s mental health board.

The Angels ads have often lacked a consistent message or theme, said Matt Holzmann, the chair of the county Behavioral Health Advisory Board, in an interview earlier this year.

“If you’re going to put together a program that doesn’t have that zing to it…it’s not going to work nearly as well,” Holzmann said.

The Angels, which are owned by billionaire Arte Moreno, have said they’re proud of their work, which they charge taxpayers millions for.

“We are proud of our partnership with OC Health Care Agency and the awareness it brings to support mental health in the county,” said Angels spokeswoman Marie Garvey in a statement earlier this year.

She declined to answer whether the team’s management or Moreno considered gifting the ads as a public service, in light of the Angels using a taxpayer-funded stadium.

Multi-million-dollar contracts with the Angels and the Ducks hockey team take up a large portion of the county’s mental health outreach budget.

Of the $2.2 million the county spent on suicide prevention outreach during from spring 2020 until late 2021, 83 percent went to the Angels.

“This [Angels] campaign was the only continuously active mental health awareness campaign that was running from April 2020 through October 2021,” a county presentation stated earlier this year.

It’s not the only taxpayer support the Angels are getting.

The team, owned by billionaire Arte Moreno, gets to use the taxpayer-funded Angel Stadium while paying an amount that averages to about $180,000 annually over a recent 12-year period.

Angel Stadium was built by the city of Anaheim in the 1960s for the equivalent of about $200 million in today’s dollars.

That’s roughly $15,000 per month – equivalent to what five apartments rent for locally on average.

The Angels made $100 million in ticket sales at the stadium, as of 2019.

This has left some wondering whether a corporate entity that gets to use a taxpayer facility at bargain basement price should be running public service ads for free.

“I suppose you could argue this is a public service ad and should be provided free,” said Susan Shelley, vice president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, in an interview earlier this year.

Nick Gerda covers county government for Voice of OC. You can contact him at ngerda@voiceofoc.org.

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Start each day informed with our free email newsletter. Be alerted when news breaks with our free text messages.

And since you’ve made it this far,

You are obviously connected to your community and value good journalism. As an independent and local nonprofit, our news is accessible to all, regardless of what they can afford. Our newsroom centers on Orange County’s civic and cultural life, not ad-driven clickbait. Our reporters hold powerful interests accountable to protect your quality of life. But it’s not free to produce. It depends on donors like you.

Voice of OC is Orange County's nonprofit newsroom. We rely on donations from people like you to sustain our news agency. Please make a contribution today: https://voiceofoc.org/donate