Jim Mosher for Council - About Me
Biographical Sketch
I was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1947, and grew up in West LA, living on a little street in a small canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains foothills, in what was then the northern fringe of the Brentwood area. My father was a 37-year public servant, working for the Los Angeles County Health Department, and my mother a homemaker.
I graduated second in my class from Pacific Palisades High School in 1965, and continued my education at Caltech, again finishing second in my undergraduate class in 1969, and going on to earn a PhD in 1977, both in physics. My graduate work including observations from the Big Bear Solar Observatory, resulting in published papers and a thesis on the birth and death of sunspots.
I subsequently worked as a research scientist, first at the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Lab interpreting data from one of their space-based solar observatories, and then for a variety of companies in Orange County.
My memories of Newport Beach date from the 1950's when our family would occasionally come here to sail a little sabot sailboat, built by my brother, four years older than me, as a Boy Scout project (I sailed it much more frequently at Marina del Rey).
I became more familiar with the City when, in the late 1960's, my brother bought a home to raise his family at the corner of Golden Circle and Anniversary Lane just as commercial jet activity from Orange County (now John Wayne) Airport was starting to take off-- directly over that location.
In 1978 (the year of Proposition 13), my parents, wishing to be closer to him and his growing family, and, ironically, to escape the skyrocketing property taxes in Los Angeles County, purchased the home on Private Road in which I now live, just off Irvine Avenue, overlooking the Upper Back Bay.
Their ill health forced me to return to Southern California in 1980 to look after them, which became a full time job for about three years prior to their death a few weeks apart in 1993. Deciding to stay in Newport Beach and purchase my brother's share of their house, I worked primarily as a consultant for some of my former employers until retiring to focus on personal interests.
Those interests included analysis of the refraction of light in sunsets observed from Ensign View (now John Wayne) Park and helping a dear friend develop a website exploring and reproducing the epoch-making astronomical observations published by Galileo Galilei in 1610. Although no longer active, that website was one of less than 30,000 in the world selected as meriting preservation as part of (and can be viewed on) the Library of Congress web archive.
As an offshoot of that, in the early 2000's, after my friend's death, I spent several years developing some quite sophisticated software, which I called the Lunar Terminator Visualization Tool, capable, among other things, of reproducing the detailed appearance of the Moon as seen from Earth or elsewhere at any date and time, past or future. Although development was interrupted by the intrusion of City government into my life, I see LTVT is still actively used worldwide by amateur astronomers and most recently was the subject of a 326-page book and a 20-minute YouTube video showing it in action (albeit in Hungarian). It's ability to precisely recreate what Galileo would have seen on the Moon in the months prior to publication of his book in 1610 also contributed to scholarly research by a renowned Harvard historian of astronomy whose suspicions played a key role in unraveling a notorious modern forgery.
I have never affiliated myself with a political party, and I believe city councils should be strictly non-partisan as well.
Why I Became a City Watchdog
As hinted at in the biographical sketch above, I live atop a bluff along the west side of the Upper Newport Back Bay, with a gorgeous view across the water toward Saddleback Peak. The only thing interrupting that view is the top of a single streetlight pole, protruding up from Irvine Avenue below.
Although I had long had a passive interest in local affairs, Newport Beach City government actions did not become top of mind for me until the afternoon of January 22, 2009, when I came home to find a message taped to my front door informing me that there would be No Parking/Tow Away zone established on my street the following week. The reason was the area would be needed for staging equipment needed to transform that very City light pole into a T-Mobile cell site.
This struck me as strange because no member of the public had received any prior notice that such use of the City streetlight was even being considered.
Upon discovering a second site, not far away, had already been constructed, which seemed to make this one unnecessary, I was able to obtain a temporary "stop work" order. But subsequent investigation and reading of City documents suggested that even a policy about such installations, which itself seemed inconsistent with the City Charter, had not been properly followed.
To make a long story short, convincing City staff or Council members that any error had been committed proved impossible, and City Attorney's Office even issued an edict warning anyone connected with the City from speaking to me about it.
Most egregiously, as later revealed through a Public Records Act request, after learning of resistance from residents, T-Mobile had notified the City it would be cancelling their (in my view, illegal) agreement with the City; but a City planner, rather than accepting the termination letter, encouraged T-Mobile to reconsider and ensured them there was no problem with continuing.
However, despite previous City assurances that the construction did not require a Coastal Development Permit, it turned out it did, and processing that delayed the possibility of construction for over a year. The matter was originally scheduled for hearing by the Coastal Commission on October 13, 2010 (W14b), but continued to January 12, 2011 (W9b) and, despite protests, ultimately approved on February 9, 2011 (W14c), largely because several of the Commissioners mistakenly assumed "Private Road" must in a gated community. However, by then T-Mobile was pursuing a contested merger with AT&T, and despite paying the City rent for the site for many years, seemed to have lost track of the application. It was not until September 2016 that T-Mobile finally cancelled their agreement with the City for good and stopped paying rent on the site.
This experience led me to believe there must be others with less time and experience to investigate such matters who must be similarly impacted by questionable City actions.
In addition, while the cell site affair was unfolding, I noted other questionable things going on, including a November 2010 ballot measure -- Measure V -- in which the City asked voters to approve 15 unrelated changes to the City Charter in a single up-down vote, including some changes that had been voted down when presented individually in the past.
Since the City Charter is supposed to be the people's document, setting both limitations and requirements on what their government can do, City-initiated changes to it are always suspicious, and forcing people to accept bad changes to get good ones was very troubling to me.
As a result, after the Coastal Commission's failure to halt the cell site project in 2011, I began attending all City meetings to obtain a better understanding of what our government was doing, including what it was doing that it shouldn't be doing.
The rest, as they say, "is history."
Why I Became a Council Candidate
I chose to offer my name on the ballot for multiple reasons:
At the time I took out the nomination papers, there was only one other candidate, and it seemed undemocratic for voters to have a single name to choose from.
Although there are now two other choices, there is no record that either of them has ever bothered to attend a Council meeting to publicly offer any advice whatsoever to the Council, or to question any action they were about to take.
I sincerely believe I could serve the people better as a Council person than the other choices. Not to mention that 13 years of criticizing the work of others comes with an obligation to, at least once, offer to attempt to do the job better than they have.