By Nicole Shine/Garden Grove Journal
With a light agenda Tuesday night, two Garden Grove council members turned their attention to complaints about the smell at the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos.
They didn’t see—or smell-– things quite the same way.
Earlier that day, Councilman Kris Beard had toured the base, where farming and mulching operations have sparked complaints by West Garden Grove residents.
He couldn’t smell anything.
“I met with a colonel there and they’re very responsive,” Beard said.
He encouraged residents to call the base whenever they notice a smell.
But Councilman Steve Jones wasn’t as upbeat, noting, “They’ll meet with you but they’re a tricky group to pin down.”
He is re-convening the multi-city working group that tackled the smell problem there a few years back. The group includes officials from cities and communities close to the base, like Seal Beach, Cypress and Rossmoor.
“We’ll keep fighting the fight,” Jones added.
In other matters, the city filled seven city commissions in mere minutes by unanimously approving Mayor Bruce Broadwater’s picks.
The mayor provided council members with a printout of his choices for the Planning; Neighborhood Improvement and Conservation; Traffic; Main Street; and Parks, Recreation, and Arts Commissions; the Sanitary District Advisory Board, and the Administrative Board of Appeals.
For planning, the mayor and council passed over the commission’s current chairman, Phat Bui. Instead, they re-appointed existing commissioners Jennifer Cabral, Mike Silva, and Gary Lazenby, and added new faces: Nolan Alejandro, Miriam Allred, Connie Margolin, and Trung Nguyen.
Broadwater closed the meeting by paying tribute to Toby Rubin, who died Jan. 11. The president of the Central Garden Grove Neighborhood Association, Rubin wasn’t shy about speaking up at council meetings. She took Council member Dina Nguyen to task as recently as Dec. 11 for speaking in Vietnamese at a meeting.
“We’re gonna miss her a lot,” Broadwater said.
