Costa Mesa City Council race is largely a tale of 2 teams

At first glance, the two teams of candidates in Costa Mesa’s City Council race might seem to have a lot in common.

Both have three members and feature an incumbent running for re-election. Both also boast a former council member hoping to return to City Hall and a longtime local resident mounting a second bid for public office.

With only a month to go until the Nov. 8 election, most of the seven candidates eyeing the three available City Council spots are trying to collect voter support not just for themselves but also for their like-minded fellow candidates.

At stake is a controlling majority on the five-member council and, by extension, the power to chart the city’s course over the next two years.

On one side is Team Costa Mesa, made up of Mayor Steve Mensinger, former councilman and state Assembly member Allan Mansoor and city senior and pension commissioner Lee Ramos.

The other side is a not-officially-named collaboration of Councilwoman Sandy Genis, former councilman Jay Humphrey and attorney and business owner John Stephens.

In interviews this week, members of both camps expressed some of the same general goals.

Those in Team Costa Mesa said they support revitalizing and redeveloping Costa Mesa’s more rundown areas, with particular emphasis on motels along Harbor and Newport boulevards that some have derided as hotspots for illegal activity.

Ensuring the city’s fiscal health is another major focus, they say.

“I think each of us bring different skills,” Mensinger said. “I bring a business background — I’m a business person who gets things done. Allan brings a law enforcement background and Lee brings a community background. I think, together, we make an incredibly strong team.”

Genis, Humphrey and Stephens are wary of high-density development in town, which they worry will snarl traffic and degrade the local quality of life.

Public safety also is a major issue for them, and they say more needs to be done to support the city’s firefighters and police officers and rebuild the ranks of those departments.

“We’re three individuals who care about the future in Costa Mesa and how we get there,” Humphrey said. “We care about the quality of governance — the openness, the transparency and the respect of the public.”

The seventh council hopeful is Al Melone, a three-time candidate, a dog park activist and a member of the city Pension Oversight Committee.

Melone calls himself an independent alternative — “the best of all worlds,” a candidate who opposes high-density building but doesn’t “want unions squeezing the taxpayers” through salaries and benefits or saddling the city with pension debt.

“I’m the only one who’s not beholden to special interests, which makes me stand alone, in my opinion,” he said.

The 2012 election had a similar dynamic to this year’s. That race featured a team known as the 3Ms — Mensinger, Councilman Gary Monahan and Planning Commissioner Colin McCarthy — and an alliance of Stephens, Genis and Harold Weitzberg, who campaigned as The Top 3 in reference to their placement on the ballot.

Candidates who spoke with the Daily Pilot this week said that just because they’re part of an election team doesn’t mean they’ll be a rigid voting bloc if elected.

“We’re being helpful to each other,” Genis said. “It’s sort of like a ‘I’ll carry your flier if you carry mine’ kind of thing, but we’re not joined at the hip entirely.”

Mansoor said his team is “on the same page on a lot of issues, though all of us reserve the right to vote independently, and I know we would do that.”

From a campaigning perspective, Stephens, who narrowly lost when he last ran for council in 2012, said he thinks working in concert with Genis and Humphrey has helped all three access one another’s “circles of influence” in the community.

“We’re fully supportive of each other,” he said. “There’s crossover between us, and I think we’re helping each other in that regard.”

Ramos, who is mounting another council bid after finishing fourth in 2014, said he thinks working with Mensinger and Mansoor “has helped tremendously.”

“Every man answers for himself,” he said, “but I believe in what we are doing and what we stand for.”