Huntington Beach could axe 2 longstanding boards and committees, change city charter

The Huntington Beach Mobile Home Review Board, which became the Mobile Home Advisory Board, was first established in 1993. Four years later, the Huntington Beach Human Relations Task Force — now called the Human Relations Commission — was formed following two high-profile hate crimes in Surf City.

Both of these decades-old citizen boards and commissions could be on the chopping block at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting.

The panel has a full agenda that could also be full of change. An ad hoc committee consisting of Mayor Tony Strickland, Mayor Pro Tem Gracey Van Der Mark and Councilman Pat Burns, which met three times, has come back with recommendations to dissolve the Mobile Home Advisory Board and the Human Relations Commission, along with the Jet Noise Commission and three existing ad hoc committees.

A charter review ad hoc committee, formed in June at Burns’ request, also has made eight recommendations for changes to the city charter, including removing advanced requirements for the city clerk position and also removing reliance on state elections code for all aspects of elections.

The City Council will weigh these changes and more when it meets at City Hall on Tuesday at 6 p.m. Van Der Mark, a City Council liaison for both the Mobile Home Advisory Board and Human Relations Commission, said in a phone interview Friday that the committee consolidation was necessary.

Ada Hand makes public comments during the quarterly Huntington Beach Mobile Home Advisory Board meeting on Monday at City Hall.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

She said residents at Mobile Home Advisory Board meetings have almost exclusively only used those meetings to ask for a rent stabilization ordinance carve-out of the city charter. Neither the existing City Council nor the previous one entertained putting such a measure on the ballot for the voters.

“We’ve had to make cuts because of the raises we had to give our police officers in order to remain competitive with other cities,� Van Der Mark said. “To have city staff sit there, and nothing gets accomplished, we figured it’s time to just restructure this.�

Last month, former MHAB member Scott Miller resigned, stating in his email that the whole board was “hopefully deadlocked, with the whole aim to accomplish nothing.�

“This is from somebody who was on the board, who also sees that it just kept going around in circles,� Van Der Mark said.

Many local mobile home owners disagree, however. At Monday’s quarterly Mobile Home Advisory Board meeting, Mobile Home Resident Coalition co-president Sharon Crabill handed 100 letters in favor of keeping the advisory board to Van Der Mark.

The other MHRC co-president, Teri Williams, said Friday that the organization will be holding a “Rally to Save Our Voices� at 4 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall.

“This Mobile Home Advisory Board has gotten more active in the last two years than it has ever been,� said regular attendee Ada Hand, who lives in Del Mar Mobile Estates. “Before that, they didn’t have a quorum because the representatives didn’t show up, so they wouldn’t do a meeting. And there weren’t a lot of people in the audience, because they didn’t advertise it.

“Nowadays, we’re the ones pushing for it, and a lot of people are attending. [The City Council members] don’t want that to happen. We’re getting power, and they want to squelch it.�

Barbara King makes public comments during the quarterly Huntington Beach Mobile Home Advisory Board meeting on Monday.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

The Huntington Beach Human Relations Committee has partnerships with the Huntington Beach Police Department and the Orange County Human Relations Council, which recently rebranded itself as Groundswell.

According to HBPD’s hate crime/incident report summary for the first six months of 2023, six hate incidents and eight hate crimes occurred in the city. This marks a significant increase from last year, when there were seven hate incidents and seven hate crimes all year long.

That’s just one reason that Human Relations Committee chairperson V.C. Rhone hopes the City Council does not dissolve her committee on Tuesday night. Rhone and HRC member Debbi Parrott both spoke to the Daily Pilot on Thursday as individuals, saying neither represented the thoughts and views of the HRC as a whole.

Rhone mentioned she has recently held detailed conversations with Van Der Mark and Burns, the council liaisons to the committee.

“We believe in working with everyone and finding common ground with everyone,� Rhone said. “We try to focus more on our similarities and commonalities than our differences.�

Parrott added she felt the Human Relations Committee has been politicized or seen as a left-leaning group at times.

“That’s not the case at all,� she said. “We have a very diverse range of political backgrounds, independent voters, etc.�

The Huntington Beach Human Relations Committee, then called the Human Relations Task Force, held a community summit on Zoom in 2020.

(Matt Szabo)

The Huntington Beach Human Relations Committee also runs programs such as the Cultural Film Festival, the HB Listens group and the student Day of Dialogue.

Groundswell chief executive Alison Edwards said Friday that her organization helped the city establish the committee after a Black man, Vernon Flournoy, was killed on a Beach Boulevard sidewalk in 1994. The skinhead charged in the killing was also accused of trying to kill two Latinos.

“From my perspective, things like building community, sending messages that everyone is going to be welcomed, working to make sure that everyone will be safe in the city — that’s vitally important work,� Edwards said. “Huntington Beach welcomes people from all over the world, so the work of the Human Relations Committee is really so important to a community like that. We’ve seen how much this work has grown over the last 25 years ... My reaction is that I hope [the HBHRC] is on the agenda to celebrate it, not to eliminate it.�

But Van Der Mark said the city can continue working with Groundswell, even without the Huntington Beach Human Relations Committee. She added that the Huntington Beach Police Department already provides resources like counseling if there are hate crimes.

“They can still do everything they’re doing,� she said of the HBHRC. “It just won’t be as part of the city of Huntington Beach ... It seems redundant to double- and triple-do what we’re doing. And we did have staff there as well.�

Huntington Beach is one of a handful of Orange County cities that is partnered with Groundswell and also has its own Human Relations Committee or equivalent group, a list that also includes Buena Park, Irvine and Mission Viejo.

“We had to make some decisions, and they weren’t easy decisions,� Van Der Mark said. “On Tuesday, we’ll probably have a lot of comments about it, but that’s what we all agreed to do.�