Otting: Accept public’s input

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of profiles on Newport Beach City Council Candidates.

When District 7 City Council candidate Dolores Otting was a school girl, one of her teachers told her she should be an attorney when she grew up, because she was always fighting for the underdog.

“And that’s what I feel like I’ve been doing. I’m always fighting for the underdog,” Otting said.

The 20-year Newport Beach resident has been a regular at the podium at City Council meetings for the past 15 years, always advocating for more open government and more public dialogue on city issues. She pores over council agendas, looking for violations of open meeting and open record laws and says the city conducts its business too often behind closed doors.

“We used to have a much more open form of government than we have today,” Otting said. “When you go up for a public hearing and ask questions, they say ‘Next.’”

Otting began going to City Council meetings about 15 years ago lobbying for local businesses to be able to choose their garbage collection service — her husband owns a sanitation company. Over the years, she’s become something of a one-woman institution at City Hall, prefacing all of her comments at the podium in Council Chambers with a perfunctory “My name is Dolores Otting. I live in Newport Beach...”

The city began posting an online calendar of city meetings and offering city agendas at the public library after she suggested them, she said, to encourage the public to be more involved in city government.

If elected, Otting said she will push to have planning and harbor commissions’ meetings recorded and televised. She also wants to do away with many of the city’s ad hoc committees, which she says impede public access to government. More city business should be done in public and not in committees, regardless of whether it takes more time to get things done, she said.

“They are on a fast track in this city,” Otting said. “They go through the process of public hearings, but the heart of the city isn’t there.”

Otting’s opponent, Councilman Keith Curry, who she also ran against unsuccessfully in 2006, said Otting is a contrarian at heart, opposing many successful city initiatives from the podium in Council Chambers.

“Dolores has opposed every major accomplishment of the city in last three years,” Curry said.

Curry also accuses Otting of ties to former Chairman of paint manufacturer Behr Process Corp. Jack Croul, who financed a flier endorsing Otting for office through the political action committee Taxpayers for Safer Neighborhoods.

Croul also was a major backer of the City Hall ballot measure earlier this year, which Curry campaigned against.

“Mrs. Otting’s campaign is being funded by Jack Croul as a personal vendetta,” Curry said. “You can’t be the campaign of transparent government and hide behind secret contributions and anonymous hit pieces.”

Otting said she has no control over how Croul spends his money and that she had nothing to do with the campaign flier, which was sent out independent of her campaign.

“I’m running my own campaign,” she said.

This is Otting’s fourth run for City Council. If she doesn’t win this time, she won’t try again, but she feels good about her campaign this year, she said.

“Everywhere I go, people wish me ‘Good luck,’” Otting said. “I’m happy with who I am and what I’m doing.”

District: 7

Years in Newport Beach: 20

Education and experience: Earned her bachelor’s degree from Salem State College; taught sixth, seventh and eighth grades in Massachusetts and Newport Beach; real estate licensee

BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at brianna.bailey@latimes.com.