Irvine city officials ran up a multimillion-dollar deficit through staff bloat and vanity projects, and now they want residents and visitors to pay for it through new fees and parking charges.
The pattern is as old as government itself: spend recklessly, then stick the taxpayer with the tab. Irvine revealed a $6 million budget deficit in April — one that could balloon to $47 million within four years — and the council's solution isn't to cut spending. It's to squeeze the people who already fund the whole operation.
Officials couldn't even bring themselves to say the word "deficit," the Orange County Register reported, opting instead for the phrase "2% budget overage" — as though linguistic gymnastics would make the hole any smaller. In May, the council ordered audits, but Councilmember Melinda Liu said she didn't want to "assign blame," and Councilmember William Go offered only that they wanted to "look at all the items that got us to that situation."
The items aren't exactly a mystery. The Register ticked through the overages: City Hall renovations, severance packages handed out in 2022, the cost of the 2025 State of the Great Park event, $700,000 blown on a Great Park gondola proposal, and the city's Office of Inclusive Excellence — a bureaucratic monument to the very ideology that drains municipal coffers across the country. Then there's the federal COVID money nobody seems to have tracked.
Councilmember James Mai named the real problem: Irvine added 250 staff positions in five years. VoiceofOC reported that councilmembers also doubled their own office budgets, from roughly $300,000 each a decade ago to over $600,000 each. The people spending the money were spending more of it on themselves.
So rather than reverse the bloat, the council is mulling a 2.4% fee on residents who pay for city services by credit card. Councilmember Mike Carroll's contribution was to ask why out-of-towners attending lacrosse matches at the Great Park "are not paying $40 to park their car." The instinct is always the same: find a new charge, not an old cut.
Meanwhile, in University Heights, Ohio, a different local government spent nearly a year wrangling over whether a residential home could become a synagogue — four planning commission meetings, several redesigns, and hours of public testimony before finally approving it 7-0, cleveland.com reported. That council layered on conditions including a 150-person occupancy cap and annual permit reviews. Whether Irvine's council will ever apply that kind of scrutiny to its own spending remains an open question.
The deficit is real. The cause is documented. What's missing is anyone willing to own it.
