EDITORIAL:

We’d like to share an old cliché with longtime Newport Beach activist Allan Beek that seems apropos today.

“Be careful what you wish for.”

Because when we read that the same Allan Beek decided to sue the city of Newport Beach to try and stop the City Hall in the Park initiative because he believes the council needed to vote on it, we did a double take.

Allan Beek?

How is that possible?

First, let us say a few things about Beek.

We don’t doubt for a minute his intentions are true. Beek loves his hometown and will do just about anything to preserve its beauty and grace.

For that, we have nothing but respect and admiration.

But Beek’s suggestion that such a major land-use decision as to where to put city hall is fit for only the council — and not the voting public — denies nearly a decade of precedence.

Beek is known as the father of the Greenlight initiative.

Greenlight passed overwhelmingly in 2000 and changed forever the law of the land in Newport Beach, calling for major land-use decisions to be removed from the council’s purview and placed directly at the ballot box.

In 2000, we made the same argument that Beek is making now. The council should decide these matters, we said. That’s what elected officials are for.

But we lost that fight, and Beek won. We’ve accepted that Greenlight is the law of the land.

Beek needs to accept that precedent also and abandon his pursued lawsuit that so easily smacks of double standards.

In fact, if he truly believes this lawsuit has merit, he should be intellectually consistent and ask that Greenlight itself be reversed.

After all, getting the public to vote on major developments is exactly what he wished for, and the results have been staggering. The Dunes project, the Koll project, the Sutherland Project have all felt the sting of Beek’s Greenlight wrath, not to mention countless others who declined developments because of Greenlight’s very existence.

If the public was suitable enough to vote on projects then, why shouldn’t it vote now?

We suspect we know the reason. Beek, like many, probably thinks this City Hall in the Park initiative is going to pass. But that’s no reason to change the game now while it’s in progress.

Whether the initiative envisioned by local architect and longtime resident Bill Ficker is the right answer is still up for debate. And we welcome more of that debate and will be eagerly studying this initiative as we head into February’s vote.

But what isn’t up for debate any longer is that the voting public now has the right to decide what it thinks are appropriate developments for their city.

And Allan Beek, of all people, should understand and respect that.