Marianne Zippi: Striving for representation and balance

June Casagrande

For Marianne Zippi, there’s a clear gap between how city

government is and how it should be.

Residents should have easy access to full information about how

their money is being spent, she says. Council members should

represent neither development interests nor an antigrowth movement.

Water-quality efforts need to keep looming deadlines in mind, and the

city’s focus on water issues should include more close consideration

of the water coming into Newport Beach through taps as well as the

water that flows from Newport Beach into the ocean.

“I think that bringing back confidence and the trust of the people

in the City Council and having a City Council that’s approachable,

that’s knowledgeable, is the most important issue in this election,”

said Zippi, a resident of Newport Beach for 10 years.

Zippi’s involvement in government over the last 20 years has

hinged directly on the need she has seen for someone to step up to

the plate to protect little people.

In the 1980s, Zippi was among 42 California delegates to the White

House Conference on Small Business, a responsibility she took on to

preserve opportunities for entrepreneurs.

In the early 1990s, she got involved in city government after

seeing a serious potential downside to Measure A, also known as the

Castaways measure. An escalation clause in the measure would have

allowed local officials to increase the dollar amount of the

measure’s 30-year tax burden on locals.

The council now in place, she said, creates too many opportunities

for residents to get the short end of the stick.

“The council is spending money without competitive bidding ... the

business with the trees ....I want to be on a council that can tell

people exactly what is happening.”

But while such sentiments weave a common thread between Zippi and

the Greenlight slate, she said that the distinctions between her and

that group are crucial.

“We need to balance our need to control traffic and growth with

our need for economic vitality,” Zippi said. “Currently, we have a

pro-development majority in the council, which caused the backlash

that put Measure S into effect. Now the pendulum is swinging in the

opposite direction. The people who got together and got the measure

passed so we would have less traffic and less density are not the

same people now trying to get a majority of the council. We did not

vote to have a Greenlight majority on the council. We voted to stop

traffic. I don’t think a majority on the City Council is good for any

citizen.”