Dear Readers,

Mail-in ballots are arriving. Nine candidates are running for three City Council seats, including all three incumbents: Mayor Mark Orgill, Sue Kempf and Alex Rounaghi.

I have attended the first three major forums and reviewed the transcripts. Village Laguna’s on August 31, the Greater Laguna Beach GOPs on September 23, and the Laguna Canyon Conservancy’s on September 28. See my Substack archive for my reporting on them. I have also gone through the candidates’ statements and websites, and I have looked at the incumbents’ records, much of it from the dais beside them. I am supporting Joy Berry, Laura Parisi and Ashley Cintas.

Here is Why: They are three different people with divergent backgrounds, and they don’t agree on everything. You will see that below. But each of them answered the question that matters: when residents and City Hall want different things, who will you serve?

Where do they stand together

Across three forums, these three were consistent on the issues residents raise most often:

· Term limits. All three support Measure E.

· Spending before taxes. All three named outside consultants as a first cut. All three oppose a sales tax increase, a tax on restaurant and bar customers, and a business license tax on gross receipts.

· No to taxpayer-built parking structures downtown, behind the police station, or on the library site.

· No general fund money to build housing. All three said the City’s assistance for the Neighborhood Congregational Church project went beyond what was needed. They also said the City should be clear about what the state actually requires versus what is a Council policy choice.

· Openness. All three would release the Downtown Specific Plan environmental report and require staff reports to present options rather than a single recommendation.

· Open space. All three oppose glyphosate in our open spaces and support permanently protecting the City’s 2,000-plus acres of open space by enrolling them in the Nature Reserve of Orange County.

· Fewer 5-0 votes. Each said the Council needs members willing to ask tough questions in public and vote no when they disagree.

Joy Berry: the rules apply to everyone

Joy has lived in Laguna for almost 30 years. She was a hotel development manager for Marriott, where she says she built about 40 hotels from the ground up, and she worked on the Montage Laguna Beach project. She later became chief operating officer of a global hotel sales company. She now runs a small lodging business in Carmel. She founded the Laguna Beach Coalition for Environmental Protection and was vice president of Village Laguna.

Her campaign rests on one idea: “one set of rules that apply to everyone, no matter who you know or how much money you have.” She has acted on it. When the Council approved a home on a hillside steeper than the General Plan’s 45% limit, her coalition sued, and the trial court agreed with them. The City has appealed. Her concern is the precedent: if the City can measure a slope from side to side instead of top to bottom, every hillside in town becomes buildable.

She is the sharpest critic of the City marketing to more visitors. She would redirect hotel-tax revenue to public safety, trash pickup, and enforcement. Most of that revenue goes into the General Fund to be spent, however the Council decides. She also wants Laguna to join with other coastal cities in pressing Sacramento and the Coastal Commission. Her developer’s eye for detail came through on two issues:

· Promenade bids. She said any contractor prices projects line by line, and the City should have done the same due diligence.

· The $8 million land trust loan. “In the real world, you get a deed of trust when you loan money.” The City may hold one, but she said it doesn’t appear in the public record, and residents were never shown how $8 million of their money is secured.

Joy brings something the Council lacks: someone who understands development from the inside and will not be talked into exceptions.

Caveat: One can reason that ANYONE with a developer background should not be on the City Council. That’s a reasonable view, but in Joy’s case I believe she will always put residents first.

Laura Parisi: the financial expert who has been shut out

Laura has been our elected City Treasurer since 1999 and is a CPA. Her career began at a large Chicago accounting firm. She sponsored SB 742, state legislation on transparency in city accounting, which is now law.

She is not running because she is tired of being Treasurer. She is running because, in her words, the Council and management have made it “increasingly difficult” to do the job voters elected her to do. This summer she found that County payments for assessment-district bonds had been received but did not appear in the City’s cash records. She reported it in writing in July and again in August. She says she still has not received an answer.

Her priorities are what you would expect from someone who has watched the City’s books for 27 years:

· Monthly revenue and expense reports to the Council.

· A professional audit committee.

· Staffing based on department audits and results.

· No new taxes or bonds to cover operating deficits.

· Safety and infrastructure first.

On contracts, she would start at the request for proposals, requiring line items to be broken out so the public can understand them. City cash and investments fell from $165 million in July 2025 to $146.6 million in July 2026. Laura is the best candidate to tell us why.

Full disclosure: I endorsed Laura earlier this year, we desperately need someone with her financial skills.

Caveat: Despite sitting in on City Council meetings for 25 plus years, she doesn’t seem to have a solid grasp of many other issues. However she is bright enough to master this shortcoming quickly, and I believe will put residents first.

Ashley Cintas: plans, timelines, and results

Ashley owns Oto Sushi downtown, which employs more than 40 people. She is a UCLA graduate and a serial entrepreneur: she co-founded a consumer-products company with her twin sister and later founded City Shoppe, an online marketplace for independent retailers. Before that, she spent years in hospitality management, including work with Ace Hotel brands across the country.

Her message is accountability. At every forum she asked the same questions of every project: What’s the plan? Who owns it? When will it be done? What does it cost? And did it work? She calls the current Council reactive, and she wants:

· Monthly budget-to-actual reports.

· A 5-, 10- and 15-year funding plan for pensions, South Laguna, insurance, and capital projects.

· A real-world stress test of our wildfire evacuation plans before a crisis finds bottlenecks for us.

As a downtown business owner, she has a practical answer to the City’s revenue problem: fill our empty storefronts before asking residents to pay more. Speeding up permitting and design review would help. On tourism, she wants current data, noting the City still relies on numbers that are about 20 years old. With that data, she would pursue longer-staying visitors rather than more day-trippers. And on the land trust loan, she was blunt: it was “not fiscally responsible.”

Readers should know that Ashley sits on the board of Visit Laguna Beach, the tourism marketing organization. She has not hidden from the issue. At the GOP forum she said she does not approve of the Council’s 10-year, non-cancelable agreement with Visit Laguna, and her approach to tourism is about measuring the cost to residents, not attracting more visitors. Still, I have criticized Mayor Orgill for sitting on Visit Laguna’s board while voting on its contract, and I hold Ashley to the same standard. If she is elected, she should step off the board or recuse herself on Visit Laguna matters, and I have asked her to say so publicly.

Ashley is newer to Laguna than the others, and she says so. What she brings is the operating discipline of someone who has to make payroll every two weeks.

Caveat: As a business owner and a board member of Visit Laguna will this candidate do what’s best for the residents of Laguna Beach, or will she be “business first.” Can she balance the two? I think she can.

Where they differ

These three are not a slate that votes in lockstep, and that is the point. A few honest differences:

· St. Catherine’s. Laura and Ashley want the community center residents were promised when the City paid $23 million for it. Joy would ask the private sector for proposals rather than let it sit underused at taxpayer expense.

· The marine protected area. Joy and Ashley support extending the no-take zone to the city limits. Laura thinks the current one is doing its job.

· The Promenade. Joy would not have built it. Laura and Ashley liked the idea but not the planning, the budget, or the result.

Three independent voices who sometimes disagree is exactly what a 5-0 Council needs.

No to the Incumbents: They have driven our city into a financial ditch, so it makes sense to hire new drivers.

I served with all three incumbents, and I respect the hours the job takes. They deserve credit for fire preparedness, where the City has invested well.

But a Council is judged by how it handles money, how it makes decisions, and to whom it listens. On all three, the record of the past four years is the strongest argument for change. They have driven our city into a financial ditch so let’s hire new drivers.

The budget is balanced on paper only. For three straight years, the Council has balanced the General Fund by moving money out of the Capital Improvement Fund, which is meant for fire stations, City Hall, parks, and beach accessways. The transfers were $2.86 million in FY 2024-25, about $1.7 million in FY 2025-26 and $2.29 million this year. This year’s budget moves $7.19 million out of that fund in all, including $3.6 million to cover a deficit in the insurance and benefits fund. The City’s own forecast shows operating deficits returning in FY 2027-28, and the unfunded pension liability grew from about $52 million in 2021 to about $96 million in 2025. All three incumbents voted for these budgets.

The big decisions are made out of public view. Again and again, two-member committees shaped major projects in private and brought finished plans to the full Council:

· The Promenade: Orgill and Kempf. Midnight tree removals didn’t sit well with the public and by most measures the design of the Promenade does not reflect the spirit of Laguna. (and then there’s the statuary, by a non-Laguna artist)

· The artists’ land trust: Rounaghi and Orgill. Its $8 million loan came out of the Vehicle Replacement Fund, the account that replaces police cars and fire engines.

· Taking over Laguna Canyon Road: Rounaghi and Bob Whalen. After spending over 4 million since 2012 the LCR undergrounding project has made little progress.

· The $84.9 million parking plan: Kempf and Whalen. The plan included a taxpayer-funded structure on church property.

· Climate Action and Sustainability Plan: In 2021 the Council unanimously approved the adoption of a plan at the cost of 400 thousand dollars.

· Main Library Should be a Parking Structure: Sue Kempf – Sue denies this, but the overwhelming evidence points to an effort to move the library to make way for a parking structure.

The City’s own news release says the 10-year Visit Laguna agreement was “crafted and negotiated in large part through the efforts of” Orgill, who sits on Visit Laguna’s board. It has no termination clause for non-performance. On September 22, eighteen days after the firefighters’ union endorsed all three incumbents, they approved a new police contract on the consent calendar, 5-0 and without discussion. Staff said some of its terms “could not be fully costed.”

The Promenade is the pattern in one project. Residents were told it would cost about $2.8 million. The night the Council approved a $7.2 million budget, it moved $4.4 million from other capital projects to pay for it. No council member questioned the bid’s $10,000-per-chair line item before voting. That same night, the Council turned down 873 residents who had petitioned for an alternative plan. Kempf now says the project is $500,000 under budget, a figure that counts only the construction contract and its contingency.

Residents are left out.

· Eagle Rock Way. Mayor Orgill called up a disputed South Laguna variance for Council review, which told neighbors they would get a hearing. On September 22, he withdrew it before the hearing began, after the deadline for residents to file their own appeal had passed.

· The Nature Reserve study. In 2023 the Council voted to study enrolling our open space in the Nature Reserve. Nothing came back for 32 months, and the findings are now scheduled for December 8, a month after the election.

· The Dupuis investigation report. In November 2023, Kempf and Rounaghi joined Whalen in a 3-2 vote to keep it from the public, after residents had paid roughly $450,000 for the former City Manager’s severance settlement.

· The Blue Cottage. In July 2025, Kempf and Rounaghi voted to let a 1914 cottage be demolished for seven parking spaces.

Election-year conversions. At the GOP forum, all three incumbents said they now oppose spending $141 million to underground Laguna Canyon Road, after pursuing it for years. They also distanced themselves from height increases in the Downtown Specific Plan they championed, and from the façade grants they approved last year. At its June study session, the Council directed staff to draft a business license tax focused on bars and restaurants. Asked about the $13 million church parking structure, Kempf said, “I don’t even remember the vote.” Asked whether the City holds a deed of trust on its $8 million land trust loan, Rounaghi said he didn’t have the answer. Orgill said, “I thought we did.” All incumbents oppose term limits on the ballot as Measure E.

The pattern shows a Council that answers first to City Hall and its allies, and to residents mainly in election years.

Question for voters

The incumbents have spent this campaign saying the right things about consultants, staffing, taxes and listening. Much of it is new, and it arrived in an election year. You can decide for yourself whether that is a change of heart or a change of season.

I am voting for Joy Berry, Laura Parisi and Ashley Cintas. I am also voting yes on Measure E.

Thank you for reading, and as always, I welcome your thoughts and any corrections.

George Weiss

Sources: Village Laguna City Council candidates forum, Aug. 31, 2026; Greater Laguna Beach GOP City Council candidates forum, Sept. 23, 2026 (Parts 1 and 2); Laguna Canyon Conservancy candidates forum, Sept. 28, 2026; official candidate statements, City of Laguna Beach, November 3, 2026 General Municipal Election; joy4laguna.com; ashleyforlaguna.com; Daily Bruin, “UCLA grad solves yoga dilemma with her business,” Jan. 30, 2014; Best of Laguna Beach, “New OTO Sushi to open late October,” Sept. 17, 2024; City Treasurer’s monthly reports, July 2025 and July 2026; City of Laguna Beach FY 2026-27 Adopted Budget; City Council staff reports, Dec. 9, 2025 and Jan. 27, 2026 (Community Land Trust loan); City of Laguna Beach news release on the Visit Laguna Beach agreement, November 2024; City Council Minutes Recap, Sept. 22, 2026 (police contract; Eagle Rock Way call-up); City Council meeting recap, Nov. 21, 2023, Item 10, and staff report, Aug. 4, 2026, Item 13; City Council meeting, Jan. 13, 2026 (Promenade contract award); City Council study session, June 9, 2026; Voice of OC, “Laguna Beach Keeps Hostile Workplace Investigation Secret,” November 2023; Laguna Beach Coalition for Environmental Protection (lbcep.com). Earlier posts on this Substack: “Four Promises, One Pattern,” “An Appeal With No Hearing,” “What the Incumbents Told the Canyon Forum,” “Across the Table,” and “Whom Do They Serve?”