Courtesy of The Weiss Report on Substack
Dear Readers,

I first met Mark Orgill in the summer of 2022, when he was contemplating a run for City Council. I had heard good things about him. He had designed 7-Degrees, the event venue near the Sawdust Festival, and had served as a part-owner and manager of that property before selling it to Mo Honarkar in 2017. From that year until roughly 2017–20, Orgill worked as a consultant for Honarkar out of his North Laguna offices.

Early Support and Growing Reservations

Mark impressed me. He pledged to overhaul the Community Development Department and reform a system he knew from the inside. I eventually contributed the maximum amount allowed by law to his campaign and helped organize neighborhood meetings in Woods Cove and at Top of the World.

As the campaign progressed, however, my confidence wavered. Orgill became surprisingly evasive about his platform, shifting positions repeatedly when pressed. At the neighborhood meetings, his unwillingness to answer questions directly was unsettling — the first sign that the reformer image might be more style than substance. I stepped back and watched as the facade began to crack.

Mark had pitched his background as his greatest asset: he knew the system’s flaws from the inside out, and we hoped he would turn that knowledge into reform measures. But as the saying goes, campaigning is poetry; governing is arithmetic. Once seated on the dais, the bold rhetoric of systemic reform quietly lost its edge.

The insider knowledge that was supposed to outmaneuver predatory developers instead manifested as a troubling level of sympathy for them. One had to ask: was Mark Orgill dismantling the developer-friendly machine, or learning how to operate its levers for a different set of interests?

Allegations at the June 23, 2026, City Council Meeting

These concerns reached a fever pitch at the June 23, 2026, City Council meeting, where Mo Honarkar’s daughters, Nikki Honarkar Bostwick and Hasty Honarkar, delivered explosive allegations about the city’s handling of their family’s long-standing property disputes.

Nikki Bostwick challenged the city’s professed “neutrality” in her family’s three-year legal ordeal. Despite a landmark ruling affirming her family’s ownership, she argued the city effectively enabled opposing parties to seize their assets. She alleged specific conflicts of interest: that Mayor Orgill’s wife was employed by the opposing party — Continuum Analytics, the MOM Group — and that Mayor Orgill himself received a settlement of over $500,000 from the MOM Group shortly after filing litigation against them to recover debts originally owed by Honarkar that the MOM Group had assumed. She further claimed that police officers on the scene at the Canyon properties in 2023 at Terra and 4 G Ventures were instructed by the City Attorney’s office to side with the opposing group and strip her father of his rights.

Note: The original settlement figure of approximately $511,000 was subsequently reduced to $312,000 after the MOM Group filed for bankruptcy.

Hasty Honarkar focused on the lack of transparency surrounding the new “Courtside Kitchen,” a commercial food operation established on the public tennis courts adjacent to Terra Laguna Beach for this year’s Festival of Arts season. She questioned how a commercial food permit was issued on public land without public disclosure — particularly given her family’s existing lease on Terra. She reminded the Council of June 30–July 1, 2023, when armed guards representing the MOM Group seized Terra Laguna Beach, and accused the city and the Festival of Arts of allowing that hostile takeover to proceed with zero accountability. The abrupt cancellation of a scheduled trial date in the lawsuit Mo Honarkar had initiated against the city and the Festival of Arts — followed immediately by the public announcement of the opening of Courtside Kitchen fueled her family’s belief that there was a coordinated effort to strip them of their rights.

Questions That Demand Answers

Taken together, the allegations raised by the Honarkar daughters form a pattern that the city has met with official silence: the Mayor’s wife’s employment by the opposing party; how Mo Honarkar was removed from Terra and replaced by the MOM Group; how the MOM Group assumed the Terra contract with the Festival of Arts; the settlement paid to Mayor Orgill and his wife by a related entity; and the armed seizure of a city owned property leased to Mo while the city looked the other way. Several of these events occurred while Orgill was already serving on the City Council.

These events may or may not be proven illegal in court. But they raise questions, a genuinely transparent mayor, who was intimately involved in the circumstances that produced them should be racing to answer.

Laguna Beach deserves elected officials whose loyalty runs to the residents who put them in office, not to the interests that provide them with benefits.

George Weiss is a former Laguna Beach City Council member and a long-time civic advocate. His investigative reporting on Laguna Beach city government appears regularly on this Substack.