We learned a lot about the character of Californians – and the cities they live in – during the COVID year of 2020. Cities built and maintained by people of character withstood the storms of changed circumstances. Newport Beach is proof of that, and Mario Marovic is a prime example.
Business owners across the spectrum faced disaster when Gov. Gavin Newsom shut down our state four years ago. Restaurant and bar owners like Mario had no idea when or if they would reopen. But Mario still found ways to help.
Remember when we couldn’t find toilet paper in stores? Well, Mario purchased thousands of rolls from his vendors to donate to low-income seniors. Despite facing potential financial ruin, he was a helper and community builder.
There were countless Marios, leaders who weren’t elected or even asked but who helped keep their communities together. Leadership that year required the same qualities that the Lord commanded of his followers in Micah 6:8: Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly.
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Too many of our elected leaders ignored that guidance. They felt they knew how others should live, ignoring their neighbors’ intelligence and dignity. Humility, on the contrary, required understanding – trusting people to make decisions based on their own unique risk profiles. That trust works both ways, making it more likely that people would listen to trusted health professionals.
Here in Newport Beach, we amplified the messaging of our community’s largest health provider, Hoag Hospital, because people trust their doctors in health and sickness. Our Fire Department partnered with Hoag to educate senior care and skilled nursing facilities because we knew early on that seniors would be the most vulnerable population to the COVID-19 virus.
That humble approach was, unfortunately, not shared across the spectrum. One Los Angeles County supervisor cast the deciding vote to shut down in-person dining in LA County – and then left City Hall to drive straight to her favorite restaurant just before the shutdown took effect. Sacramento agencies opened and closed businesses based on a color-coded chart that took into consideration how many trees existed in neighborhoods.
The toxic mixture of that sort of hubris reached the boiling point when Gov. Newsom targeted Orange County’s beaches. During one warm weekend, when LA and San Diego County’s beaches remained closed, a long-lens photo of Newport Beach made it appear that our shore was packed with people. In reality, on that weekend, we had fewer than a third of the people we’d have hosted on any normal Fourth of July. Without calling anyone, including me, the city’s mayor, Gov. Newsom announced that he was shutting down our beaches by executive dictate.
Never mind that LA County had shut down its beaches for over a month and that, despite that closure, every single LA County beach community posted higher per capita COVID infection rates than Orange County’s open-beach communities. Never mind that we were dealing with a respiratory virus with no confirmed outdoors transmission. Never mind, even, that Costco, Walmart, and marijuana dispensaries remained open while Gov. Newsom closed beaches.
Here in Newport Beach, we fought back. We saw that the governor hadn’t relied on hard science. He had instead relied on political science – and in doing so, he put our residents at risk and eroded public trust. He reversed course quietly, but never learned the lesson. In fact, later that year, he held a press conference in which he actually recommended that people’s health could be improved by … going to the beach.
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