Jordan Brandman

Jordan Brandman
Member of the Anaheim City Council (at-large)
Incumbent
Assumed office December 2012
Member of the Anaheim Union High School District Board of Trustees (at-large)
In office February 2008 – December 2012
Personal details
Political party	Democratic

Jordan Brandman is an American politician currently serving his first term on the Anaheim City Council. He is a Democrat, elected at-large to the nonpartisan council. Prior to being elected to the City Council, he was a member of the Anaheim Union High School District Board of Trustees and an aide to Governor Gray Davis.^[1]

Early years and education

Brandman grew up in the city of Orange, California, and graduated from El Modena High School. He is one of five sons to Michael and Mara Brandman.^[2] Mara Brandman was active in Orange's civic affairs, serving on its Planning Commission and Public Library Board of Trustees. In recognition of her record of advocacy, the Sully-Muller Arena in Orange Park Acres was renamed the Mara Brandman Horse Arena on July 5, 2011.^[3] Brandman attended UC Irvine, from which he graduated with a B.A. in political science.

Career

California state government

Brandman served as an education policy advisor to California Governors Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the office of the Secretary of Education.^[1]

Orange County government

Brandman went to work as an aide to his friend and mentor County Clerk-Recorder Tom Daly as an "External Relations Manager," essentially doing public relations and meeting prominent local actors and donors. This led to controversy in 2012, as he prepared for his first run for City Council. Brandman quit his job in the Clerk's office, at which moment Daly granted him a $24,000 contract to produce a report on the viability of a West County Clerk-Recorder Satellite Office. Despite having collected the money, Brandman failed to produce the report in a timely manner, repeatedly asking for extra time to complete it. Daly responded by giving him more money When the final product was delivered and made public, it was discovered to include vast chunks of material plagiarized from Wikipedia.^[4] (See "Timeline of Wikipedia Plagiarism Scandal" below.)

Anaheim City Council

Brandman joined the City Council in December 2012 as its sole Democrat. He immediately joined a coalition with three of the other four Council members, all who supported subsidies to large corporations, especially in the "Anaheim Resort District." That area includes Anaheim Stadium (now commonly known as "Angels Stadium"), the Honda Center (home of the Anaheim Ducks), the "Disney Resort" (including Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure), and the Anaheim Convention Center. They have been opposed by Mayor Tom Tait, who gained one ally in the 2014 election but remained in the minority. Brandman was especially favorable towards clients of his political patron, the former Mayor Curt Pringle, who heads a lobbying firm doing extensive business within Anaheim and with its government. All of the above interests have been major donors of (or provided substantial independent expenditures to) his campaigns.^[5]

One of Brandman's first controversial votes on Council was to rebate an estimated $158 million in expected TOT ("transient occupancy tax" or "hotel tax") collected from hotel-goers over the course of 20 years. The beneficiary was to be a Pringle-represented client, developer Bill O’Connell, on the condition that he built a hotel with "four-diamond amenities" (without necessarily actually receiving a AAA four-diamond rating) at the Resort District's "Gardenwalk" property. This became popularly known as the "Gardenwalk Giveaway";^[6] it remains a major bone of contention between supporters of former Mayor Pringle and current Mayor Tait.

2013: The Angels Stadium Controversy

In 2013, Brandman voted to allow the baseball team, the "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim," to lease the entire city owned parking lot for $1 a year while simultaneously allowing the team's owner (Arte Moreno) to build on the land. Moreno would keep all revenues from developing the city owned land in exchange for not relocating the team. A preliminary agreement regarding the de facto land grant was signed without the City even having assessed the value of the land it was giving away for 60+ years; a later city study estimated the value of the city owned space at over $300,000,000. Brandman and his Council majority colleagues thus voted for the largest proposed giveaway of city owned property in the history of Anaheim and Orange County.^[7]

The four-member council majority justified this unusual deal by claiming that the team would leave Anaheim if it didn't happen. Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait, while only one vote against the deal out of five, managed to embarrass both sides into not consummating the agreement by writing and speaking out against it. The Angels have not left Anaheim in the two years since, and are now back at the negotiating table.^[8] However, as part of the preliminary agreement with the Angels, the Council majority extended the deadline by which the Angels could decide to leave the city and its stadium by 2-1/2 years.

2014: The Convention Center Expansion Controversy

In March, 2014, Brandman, along with his council allies, approved the sale of controversial bonds to facilitate an expansion of the Anaheim Convention Center. The project was supported by a familiar coalition of resort-area interests and building-trade unions previously associated with Curt Pringle; Turner Construction, the design-build contractor who had been given a no-bid contract by the council was also a Pringle and Associates client.^[9]

Of the $300,000,000 raised by the bond sale, approximately $50,000,000 was directed to refinancing existing debt; another $20,000,000 was added for capital and road manintenace in order to create popular support for the sale. The bonds were not secured by Convention Center revenue, but rather by the city's General Fund, in direct contravention of Anaheim's city charter that requires a vote of the people to promulgate general revenue bonds.^[9]

CATER, a local watchdog group, sued the city, challenging the relationship between the council and its own "Redevelopment Successor Agency" and the ability of the "Joint Powers Authority" ("JPA") governing that relationship to incur debt. The bond offering was revoked by the city -- which initially created a second Joint Powers Authority with its own Housing Authority to issue the bonds. The Housing Authority, like the Redevelopment Successor Agency, is governed by the exact same City Council members which were finally issued in November 2014.^[10] The City argued successfully that these Joint Powers Authority did not have to abide by either the City Charter or the "required citizen vote" provision of the California State Constitution. Although an appeal of the lawsuits was eventually dropped, investigators later discovered that Anaheim Public Works personnel intentionally misled the court in sworn statements about the true cost of the delay.^[11]

The arrangement of the JPA proved controversial and was subsequently criticized by the Orange County Grand Jury, which asserted that the Anaheim's JPA had "the potential to use this organizational structure as a shell company to avoid other legal constraints on the controlling entity and to obfuscate taxpayer responsibility."^[12]

The expansion project has been beset by numerous site condition issues and associated delays that have become a matter of contention between Turner and the city. In the summer of 2016 Turner sued the city, claiming approximately $9,000,000 in delay damages as the result of these issues.^[13]

July 2016: The Giveaways Pass $700 million

In June of 2015, two years after the $158 million "Gardenwalk Giveaway," Brandman and his two Council allies Kris Murray and Lucille Kring decided to implement its basic idea as a general policy: henceforth, if a developer offered to build a "Four Diamond" hotel (or, rather, a hotel with "Four Diamond" amenities) in the city, Anaheim taxpayers would subsidize them by refunding 70% of their Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) for a period of twenty years. The majority justified this largesse by asserting that Anaheim badly needed four-diamond hotels, citing the need to attract visiting professional athletes to stay in the city as opposed to in coastal communities such as Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, but that they would not be built without generous subsidies. Mayor Tom Tait, joined by his new Council ally James Vanderbilt, strenuously objected to the policy, depicting it as completely unnecessary corporate welfare that would break the city's budget for decades. The argued that, if the market would support four-diamond hotels in Anaheim, they would be built anyway without subsidies -- and that the city would do better to encourage three-diamond hotels that paid the City 100% of their TOT.^[14]

In July 2016, two large corporations, Disney, and Hong Kong-based Wincome Group, decided to accept the majority's invitation and build three subsidized four-diamond hotels. This deal was also enthusiastically promoted by Brandman and his allies and furiously opposed by Tait and Vanderbilt; as proposed it would dwarf the Gardenwalk Giveaway for a total of $560 million lost revenue to the city. Brandman proudly lauded the "project labor agreements" he had arranged for the temporary construction jobs, which were to be union and local; the building trades unions came out in force to support this deal and Brandman in that year's Council election. The achievement was criticized when a reading of the actual contracts between developers and city shows that the developers merely needed to make a "good faith effort" to use local hires.^[15]

The deals were opposed by other unions representing the permanent hotel workers, who were given no union protection and faced spending the next twenty years or more in a city starved of TOT revenue.^[16] Meanwhile Brandman's November 2016 re-election campaign has been funded, to the tune of nearly a million dollars, by a grateful combination of Disney, the resort district, and the building-trades unions.^[17]

Brandman's Involvement in Anaheim's District Elections Saga

2012: Disney's Messenger

In the summer of 2012, as school board member Brandman waged his first Council campaign, the ongoing movement and lawsuit to bring district elections to Anaheim for the better enfranchisement of the Latino majority seemed to have a new urgency, between a spate of police killings, ensuing riots, and a revolt against the council majority’s corporate giveaways called “Let the People Vote.”

At the mammoth August 8, 2012 council meeting held at Anaheim High School’s Cook Auditorium, Mayor Tom Tait and his ally Lorri Galloway were resolved to get the question of districting onto that year’s high-turnout November ballot. The three-member council majority of Kris Murray, Gail Eastman and Harry Sidhu were equally resolved to keep the question off the ballot.

That morning, Disneyland Resort’s chairman George Kalogridis surprised the world with a letter to the Council ostensibly supporting districts – but only as an idea. The letter went on to emphasize that although districting would be a great thing for democracy in Anaheim, it was important to first study the question at length before jumping into it. When Brandman showed up at the meeting that night, he delivered a speech nearly identical to the Disney letter.^[18]

And the Council majority did refuse to put the question on that year’s ballot, while creating a committee to study all the pro’s and con’s of the question and all the different ways it could be done; and opted to continue fighting the districting plaintiffs in court.^[19]

It was impossible in effect to tell the difference between the positions of the straightforwardly anti-districting council majority versus the nominally pro-districting Disney and Brandman – in either case, the result was four years of delay, four years of continued dominance of Disney and other wealthy interests, four years of continued disfranchisement of the city’s Latino majority, and three million dollars of taxpayer money wasted in an ultimately unsuccessful fight against the lawsuit.

2012 to 2014: A Show of Weak Support

As November’s election drew closer, and the Democratic Party of Orange County passed a resolution strongly in favor of districting, Democrat Brandman came under pressure to take a stronger pro-districting position. Eventually he promised to support settling the lawsuit if he got onto the Council.^[20]

This turned out to be an easy, inconsequential promise to keep, as Brandman merely replaced Galloway on Council and stayed safely in a pro-districting minority with Mayor Tait. One incident that he has still not explained however, was his early-2013 choice of vociferously anti-districting and anti-immigrant Amanda Edinger as his appointee on the committee studying the matter.^[21]

By early 2014 the council majority finally lost the lawsuit, at the cost of $3 million to Anaheim taxpayers, and was forced to put the matter on that November’s ballot since Anaheim is a charter city. The idea of district elections proved overwhelmingly popular, winning 70% of the vote (and showing the distance between the council majority and popular opinion.)^[22]

Holiday Season 2015-16: Brandman's Attempted Sabotage

2015 would be spent choosing between different possible maps, dividing the city into six for six council districts with a mayor elected at large. By late 2015 a map known as “The People’s Map” was unanimously accepted; all that was left was to determine which four districts would get to vote first, in November 2016 (one of them to draw a short straw and vote again in 2018 with the two remaining districts.)

Since the basis of the lawsuit was disfranchisement of the city’s Latino majority, and since the new districts included one district (#3) that was majority Latino and two (#4 and 5) that were plurality Latino, most assumed that these three districts, or at the very least #3, would be allowed to vote in the high-propensity 2016 election.

But at the November 17, 2015 meeting Brandman and his two allies (Lucille Kring and Kris Murray) stunned observers by stubbornly refusing to let the Latino majority district vote in 2016, offering several pretexts which strained credulity and need not be listed here. Most observers concluded that Brandman was merely trying to avoid having to run against the popular Dr. Jose Moreno, architect of the districting lawsuit, in the heavily Latino 3rd district in which both men lived.

At the next, Dec. 8 meeting, attended by hundreds of angry citizens demanding to let District 3 vote, Brandman stunned observers again by going even farther, voting with his two allies to throw out the People’s Map and begin a search for another map – a process that would have created even more delay and possibly put of district elections for yet another two years.^[23]

The next, January 12, meeting, was again attended by hundreds of outraged protesters, this time demanding “Bring back the People’s Map!” Shortly before midnight, Brandman reversed both his draconian decisions with no explanation. To all appearances, all that really happened was that he lost his majority beginning with Lucille Kring, who finally gave in to the crowd’s rage and entreaties. This meeting was memorialized in a popular song called “When the Kleptos Caved.”

Brandman is now forced to run against Dr. Moreno (and several other candidates) in District 3 this November 8, and tells voters a sanitized version of the above events hoping they will forget everything he did to prevent this election.

Detailed Summary of Brandman's Wikipedia Plagiarism Report Controversy

Citations: "VOC" = Voice of OC, reporting by Adam Elmahrek "OCR" = Orange County Register (largely quoting VOC)

1. Work in Tom Daly's County Clerk-Recorder's office

1.1 Brandman was hired by Tom Daly in 2011, as an “External Relations Manager” [a job entailing meeting with and speaking before important people who could fund his campaigns] (VOC, 2013-03-14, p. 1)

1.1.1 “Daly authorized the contract, but it was signed by [his supervisor Renee] Ramirez and she approved the payments.” (OCR, 2013-03-21, p. 2)

1.2 Brandman was asked on January 31, 2012, to file report on whether the clerk-recorder needed a branch office in western Orange County. (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 1)

1.2.1 The two branch offices in North and South county had proved to be very popular and very successful. (VOC, 2013-03-14, p. 1; Rene Ramirez, p. 3, quoting letter from Ramirez to VOC).

1.3 Brandman’s contract gave him until July 31, 2012, to submit the completed report. (VOC, 2013-03-14, p. 3)

2. Brandman was paid $24,000 for incomplete, untimely draft work

2.1 Comments from Supervisor Todd Spitzer, VOC, VOC, 2013-03-14

2.1.1 County paid consultant-Brandman for work in draft form.

“You can’t pay a consultant for work that’s in draft form.”

“None of these payment should have been made.”

Per contract documents, first payment of $4,800 was received without delivering anything. (VOC, 2013-03-14, p. 2)

2.2 Late submission and contract adjustments

2.2.1 Original document was due seven (7) months earlier, VOC, 2013-03-14, p. 2

2.2.2 Brandman received two contract extensions and a $1500 increase in his contract during its first seven (7) months. (VOC, 2013-03-14, p. 2)

2.2.3 According to County Clerk officials, Brandman was paid $4,800 in additional invoices until reaching a total of $24,000. (VOC, 2013-03-14, p. 2)

2.3 Comments of Supervisor John Moorlach on how the County was ripped off

2.3.1 Moorlach says the County paid 24x the value of the draft. (Moorlach, VOC, 2013-03-14,, p. 2)

2.3.2 Per Moorlach, if the rate for a top end consultant is $200 per hour, Brandman should have spent 120 hours on project – not just 5 hours.

2.4 Inexplicable and Unjustified Delays

[Per memos by Ramirez to OC Bd of Sup. dated March 14 and March 15, 2013]

2.4.1 Daly twice extended deadline and increased compensation by $1500, per the memos of March 14 and 15. (VOC, 2013-03-18, p. 3)

2.4.2 Supv. Spitzer asked Ramirez why it took so long to complete the report, (VOC, 2013-03-14, p. 2)

2.4.3 Response from Ramirez response: Brandman asked for additional time, but she did not know why it took him so long to complete the report. (VOC, 2013-03-14, p. 3)

2.4.4 On March 12, 2013, Ramirez had a conversation with Brandman and insisted that Brandman “make finalizing the report his top priority.” (VOC, 2013-03-18, p. 4)

2.4.5 Brandman agreed to a March 22 deadline to complete his report. (VOC, 2013-03-18)

2.4.6 Daly: “at this point, it is certainly reasonable for any county official to want the work finished.” (OCR, 2013-3-21, p. 2))

2.5 Brandman Accused of Poor Quality Work -- and Plagiarism

2.5.1 Turnitin.com reviewed Brandman's’ work. This is a well-known plagiarism detector. Says up to 23% of Brandman's draft was plagiarized. —copied directly from other facilities needs studies, clerk recorder documents and other government sources. (VOC, 2013-3-21, p. 2)

2.5.2 For example, Turnitin stated that a list of “questions pondered” in report was copied almost verbatim from a Laguna Hills recreation Facilities Needs Assessment prepared by consultant GreenPlay. (VOC, 2013-3-21, p. 2)

2.5.3 Officials in Laguna Hills-based GreenPlay responded that they were “unable to determine” whether Brandman plagiarized from GreenPlay, but they did not pursue copyright infringement and view copycat consultants as the “sincerest form of flattery.” (VOC, 2013-3-21, p. 2)

2.6 Damning Evidence from Wikipedia Cites

2.6.1 Brandman only cited “other multimedia sources” (VOC, 2013-03-18, p. 2)

2.6.2 Wikipedia and Brandman’s report had the same population error regarding the numbers of Africa Americans in a given table. The figure was corrected in Wikipedia -- but it was never corrected in Brandman report. (VOC, 2013-03-18, p. 2)

2.6.3 Wikipedia entries that resemble Brandman’s reporthad been written over years by writers such as “Ram-man” aka “Derek Ramsey,” and “Mr. Whipple” (VOC, 2013-03-18)

2.7 A Governmental Ethics Expert Condemns Brandman's, Hiring, Work Product, and Compensation

2.7.1 Judy Nadler, senior fellow at the Santa Clara University Markkula Center for Applied Ethics – a leading expert on government ethics, says that an entire section of Brandman report was largely copied from the Wikipedia entry on "Orange County.” (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 1)

2.7.2 She added that Brandman’s Report contained clear examples of plagiarism and was “problematic on a number of levels.” (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 1)

2.7.3 She questioned whether OC has basic contracting protections in place. (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 1)

2.7.4 Nadler would not be inclined to accept Brandman’s report because “it’s something that frankly a high school intern could have done, anyone could have done.” (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 2)

2.7.5 Nadler would be “really surprised and disappointed to see if you could submit anything you want.” (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 2)

2.7.6 Nadler suggested OC should review how Brandman's contract was awarded, standards regarding work product and compensation, justification for outsourcing the work.” (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 2)

2.7.7 Nadler says it looks like an “inside deal.” (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 2)

2.7.8 Nadler agreed with Todd Spitzer that there should be protections against compensating a consultant for incompetent work product. (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 2)

2.7.9 Beyond questions regarding Brandman’s professional abilities, Nadler thought that this project might justifiably be outsourced if the goal was to hire an unbiased consultant uninterested in benefitting the department’s employees. But hat reasoning seems inapplicable here, because the contract was given to Brandman on same day he left his County job! (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 2)

2.7.10 Nadler states that if this is all that it takes for a $24,000 contract, then “a lot of people are going to be asking for contracts.” (VOC, 2013-03-19, p. 2)

2.8 FINAL REPORT by Brandman

2.8.1 Ramirez stated that Brandman was also asked to beef up sections of the submitted draft with “additional information and details” not included in document released to the public. (VOC, 2013-03-18, p. 4)

2.8.2 Supervisor John Moorlach stated that:

2.8.2.1 Brandman appeared to have spent no additional time assembling the report

2.8.2.2 A proofreader was needed to weed out typographical errors

2.8.2.3 Essential information was missing from the report:

2.8.2.3.1 The report does not indicate the cost of a satellite office

2.8.2.3.2 The report does not explain how the office would be managed

2.8.2.3.3 The report does not indicate how much it costs to run the existing satellite office in Laguna Hills (VOC, 2013-03-27, pp. 1-2)

2.9 Impacts of Brandman’s inadequate work on County policy

2.9.1 Given the questions regarding the authenticity of the report, Supervisor Moorlach suggested (1) not paying Brandman, and (2) new rules on county contracting (VOC, 2013-03-18, pp. 1-2)

2.9.2 Moorlach also wanted “more explanation from Ramirez (OCR, 2013-03-21, pp. 2)

2.9.3 Renee Ramirez stated in 3-15-13 memo to the Board of Supervisors that she was hunting for other questionable contract arrangements and is in process of looking at all open contracts and will share finding with OC Bd of Sups. (VOC, 2013-03-18, pp. 2, 4)

2.9.4 On behalf of County Counsel Nick Chrisos, Supervising Deputy County Counsel Anne E. Fletcher sent a letter to Brandman on March 15, 2013, demanding that he immediately complete the report or else refund the $24,000. (VOC, 2013-03-18, pp. 1-2)

2.10 Someone else (Ramirez) has her career destroyed due to Brandman's actions

2.10.1 Daly says that he takes responsibility for the situation, but that Ramirez can expect to face questions about her role when she interviews to be appointed as Daly’s successor. (OCR, 2013-03-21, p. 1)

2.10.2 Supervisor Todd Spitzer says that Ramirez “has a lot of explaining to do” -- especially as to why the contract was extended and why Brandman was paid for incomplete work. (OCR, 2013-03-21, p. 2)

2.10.3 On 4-2-13, Hieu Nguyen was appointed by OC Supervisors, on a 4-1 vote, to become the new OC Clerk-Recorder, an appointment that Ramirez had once been expected to receive (VOC, 2013-04-03, p. 1)

2.10.4 Supervisor Pat Bates said of the appointment of Nguyen rather than Ramirez: “There was a desire to change at the office based on Daly’s decision to give Brandman the $24,000 a year [sic] job.” (VOC, 2013-04-03, p. 1)

2.10.5 Bates continued: “The deliverables [Brandman’s overdue report on opening satellite offices] were questionable. (VOC, 2013-04-03, p. 1)

2.10.6 Supervisor Spitzer said that he felt horrible for Ramirez, whom Daly and Brandman had placed in a “no-win” situation. (VOC, 2013-04-03, p. 3)

2.10.7 Supervisor Shawn Nelson said that the issue created “a real predicament” for Ramirez’s candidacy because of the way she (Ramirez) handled this issue. (OC Register, 3-21-13, p. 2). Nguyen became the obvious choice, given that there was a desire for change at the office. (VOC, 2013-04-03, p. 2)

2.10.8 Hieu Nguyen was elected OC Clerk-Recorder in 2014, over candidates including Ramirez

2.11 Questions from the OC Register that Brandman has been unwilling to answer

2.11.1 Why did he request two deadline extensions? (OCR, 2013-03-21, p.2)

2.11.2 Was a section of the draft covering population demographics lifted from Wikipedia? (OCR, 2013-03-21, p.2)

Brandman has gone on to have a financially successful career on the City Council, which has included a lucrative appointment to the Orange County Water District Board of Directors.

References

External links

• Official Anaheim City Council website