Inside City Council: Vice Mayor Tammy Kim
Vice Mayor Tammy Kim was elected in 2020. Photo credit Tony Kawashima
Vice Mayor Tammy Kim is full of passion. Ask her about Irvine’s milk tea scene, and you’ll get an ear full of city pride along with some rumblings about an Eastvale-Irvine milk tea rivalry.
“I feel I'm so blessed to be in the milk tea capital of Southern California,” says Kim. “I heard people in Eastvale were saying that their milk tea was better than ours. I’m going to fight for our integrity in terms of our milk tea. It’s the best.”
In the third of our series on Irvine’s City Council, Kim shows that she is unafraid of a fight. She connects with The Vine briefly on Zoom before poor internet connection forces us to switch to a phone call. It is the perfect opportunity for Kim to announce her plans to create municipal broadband for its residents and businesses.
“We have seen that Internet cannot be treated as a luxury,” says Kim. “It is a necessity. It needs to be treated like electricity. It’s not an option anymore. We cannot have poor internet connection in 2021 here. And so I'm looking at establishing some sort of municipal broadband system here within the city of Irvine.”
Kim blames our current situation of less-than-stellar Internet on Cox’s cartel-like control of the city.
“Right now Cox has a monopoly,” explains Kim. “We've got really horrible service and we pay a lot. The monopoly that exists within the cable companies makes it very hard to do this. You've got to have the will to do this. And I have the will to do it.”
Kim hopes Irvine’s Internet can resemble what she has experienced during trips abroad.
“If you look at other industrialized countries, this is not the way it is,” says Kim. “I visited Korea. You can get cell service everywhere. You have blazing fast internet. And then you come here where you and I just had to get on the phone because of unstable Internet. In a modern fast-growing city, a city of innovation like the city of Irvine, this is not acceptable.”
So what will life be like with Irvine’s municipal broadband? If all goes according to plan, it’ll be a whole lot better.
“It's going to look radically different from what we have right now,” Kim says. “What it'll look like is providing our residents with more reliable service, faster and cheaper. That's what it'll look like.”
Kim’s passion for Irvine and its residents started long before she ran for a seat on Irvine’s City Council. Born in Korea and raised in Michigan, Kim moved to Irvine for work in 2005. She ran the Korean American Center, a nonprofit organization promoting Korean language and culture, and got to know a lot of Irvine’s residents and businesses in the process.
“I was one of those people that spoke out at City Council meetings,” recalls Kim. “Being aware of what was happening in the city, and running a nonprofit organization here within the city of Irvine, I was very much aware of what the city was about and what was going on.”
Last month Irvine’s Korean American Center was featured in local news as part of AAPI Heritage month. Video credit NBC Channel 4 News
These connections set Kim up for success when she ran for City Council in 2020. Although she held the position of Finance Commissioner, Kim was a first time candidate on the ballot. When the election results were tallied, she was thrilled to discover she received the most votes of any City Council candidate in Irvine’s history.
“It was crazy,” Kim remembers. “I was the first candidate to come in first place as a first-time candidate. That’s a lot of firsts.”
Since her election, it’s been full steam ahead for Kim as a busy Vice Mayor.
“In the short time that I've been elected, one of the proudest moments has been the fact that the city of Irvine was the first city in Orange County to establish its own hate crime portal in multiple languages,” says Kim. “I introduced that and it passed the City Council unanimously with the support of my Council colleagues.”
The swift adoption of the hate crime portal by the City Council showed Irvinites that the city is taking action.
“We have to know what's happening and we have to have that level of accountability,” Kim explains. “Hate crimes do exist and hate incidents do exist. Establishing our own hate crime portal allows us to number one know what's happening and number two know how to respond to it. We can't put our heads under the sand and think that it's not happening.”
At the time of our interview, Kim did not know how many incidents had been reported, but she knew that submissions to the portal were being funneled to appropriate departments instead of getting aired on social media.
“We want to know what's happening,” Kim says. “We don't want to have to hear about these things on Twitter. And that's what was happening. Members of the city council did know what was happening and that's why it passed unanimously.”
Kim’s dedication to Irvine is clear, as is her civic pride.
“There's so much that I love about this place,” gushes Kim. “I love that it's clean. I love the openness, I love the diversity, I love the environment. The overall atmosphere is great. People are really super nice. But what I really, really love about Irvine are the people.”
Find out what Vice Mayor Kim is up to! You can follow her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
To see more in our Inside City Council series, check out these stories:
