POLITICAL LANDSCAPE:Assemblyman receives new addition

Costa Mesa Assemblyman Van Tran will be working some late nights, but not for marathon budget negotiations with other legislators. Instead of trying to cut taxes and shrink government, he’ll be warming bottles and changing diapers for his first child.

Tran’s wife, Cyndi, gave birth early Friday to the couple’s son. Alexander Thai-Son Tran (the assemblyman says the middle name means “great mountain” in Vietnamese) weighed 6 pounds, 11 ounces and was born two weeks early.

Tran said Wednesday being in the delivery room to watch the birth was “a gift from God.” But while being a father is great, it has its trials.

“Changing a lot of diapers is the most difficult thing, because he’s so tiny and he cries and he wiggles a lot,” Tran said.

Parenthood has given Tran a new perspective on his job and responsibilities as a legislator, he said.

“You really wonder and you can’t help but ask yourself, ‘What kind of future does my son have here in California or in the United States 20 or 30 years from now — how will we be as a country and what opportunities will he have?’ ” Tran said.

“Definitely, as with any father or any parent, you want to see your kid grow up to be happy and healthy and to have all the opportunities that you have.”

Reining in the rising cost of government employee pensions is the purpose of a new ballot measure, backed by Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach. The measure, filed last week with the secretary of state, would cap the amount of retirement benefits new government employees could collect.

The more cynical among us might ask, as an elected official doesn’t Moorlach himself collect a government pension? In fact, one Daily Pilot reader did ask, commenting on the paper’s website posting under the name “Citizen”: “Moorlach should make a sign of goodwill by forgoing his own government pension and only accepting one based upon his new formula.”

For the record, Moorlach said he did try to opt out of the county pension plan when he was appointed treasurer in 1994. But nobody administrating the pension could understand why he’d refuse it, and they made it so difficult to get out, he just stayed in, he said.

“I asked, I researched it, and I got the door shut in my face,” he said.

To a journalist who fights against the clock every day, it’s refreshing to occasionally see someone else blow a deadline. In this case, it’s likely to be the Newport Beach City Council and the June 30 deadline Mayor Steve Rosansky set to find a city hall site.

The date comes up Saturday, and the council is still waiting for a report from a consultant on an Orange County Transportation Authority park-and-ride site that some council members think is most viable. Some residents also are trying, via a ballot measure, to put the city hall on a parcel next to the city’s central library.

City Manager Homer Bludau said the report likely won’t come back to the council until the July 24 meeting.

“I find it discouraging, but not surprising considering how the process has gone,” Rosansky said Wednesday. “I think it’s been taken out of our hands because of the initiative process.”

Rosansky has supported building on the 12.8-acre, library-adjacent site, which already was pledged to become a park. While some council members seem ready to forge ahead with the park-and-ride site, Rosansky said, “At the end of the day, if the initiative passes we’ll have wasted a bunch of money.”

Newport Beach won’t become one of more than 540 cities that have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Change Agreement, the council decided Tuesday, but it may end up with its own statement tailored to the city’s situation.

Councilwoman Nancy Gardner asked the council to consider signing the climate change pact, which encourages cities to take steps such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, buying alternative fuel vehicles, and making the community more “walk-able.”

“I’m not trying to convince anybody that doesn’t agree about the human impact of climate change,” Gardner told colleagues at Tuesday’s meeting. “This is an energy issue more than anything. I don’t think anyone would disagree that we need to wean ourselves off oil.”

But Councilman Keith Curry complained that the 2005 agreement is outdated, asking them to support state legislation that was adopted last year and to take a position on the Kyoto Protocol, which some people fear could hurt the U.S. economy.

He also pointed to new environmental initiatives, announced at the G8 summit earlier this month, that aren’t mentioned in the mayors’ agreement.

“I frankly take a firm line against wading into national and international issues on behalf of the council,” Curry said. Instead, he suggested the city draw up its own resolution on what it has already done — planting trees, urging developers to build green, and using alternative fuel vehicles in the city fleet, for example — and what it can still do.