KIDS THESE DAYS:Mayor’s world conflicts with reality

It must be nice to live in the perfect world of Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor. In the mayor’s world, all neckties are perfectly knotted on the first try, all drivers use their turn signals and the cable company answers each phone call on the second ring.

There is no other way to describe the almost complete disconnect between reality and the mayor’s version of recent developments in the city as he portrayed them in a recent letter to the editor. (“Council responding to citizens’ requests,� Aug. 4).

The most shocking of these is his take of the closing of the Job Center on Placentia Avenue.

“The Job Center was a blight on the neighbor- hood,� the mayor says.

It would be a good idea for the mayor to drive down Placentia Avenue about 7 a.m. If he does he will see what I saw nearly every weekend for the first six months after the center closed and what I saw two days ago.

Instead of the orderly discharging of the day workers that the Job Center provided, day workers are scattered up and down Placentia Avenue just as they were before the center opened.

Last Sunday, I counted 11 day workers loitering at the corner Placentia and Victoria Street and, like the limb that has been lost but which the body fails to acknowledge, there were a dozen more where the Job Center used to be.

Those numbers double on Saturdays.

In the mayor’s world, the new restrictions on play at Paularino Park “will not keep anyone from tossing a ball or throwing a Frisbee with their kids.�

That’s interesting, considering that City Atty. Kimberly Hall Barlow has indicated otherwise.

The mayor went on to take credit for the results of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the city’s jail, not his idea, and for “studying the possible extension of the 55 Freeway through cut and cover tunneling,� discussions that have been ongoing for at least as long as the 22 years I have lived in the city.

While the mayor was slapping himself on the back for years of sloppy decisions, his perfect-world scenario did not allow him to comment on whether to allow safe and sane fireworks in the city, one of the most important decisions the City Council will make on behalf of youth athletics in both Costa Mesa and Newport Beach.

The mayor declined to comment on a recent proposal to raise the hotel bed tax by 2% and give some of the revenue to fund youth sports, thus removing the need to sell fireworks each year.

Perhaps the mayor agrees with the proposal but could not bring himself to admit it because it was proposed by City Councilwoman Linda Dixon, with whom he rarely agrees.

Or it may be because in a rare moment of clarity, the mayor realizes that banning safe and sane fireworks will not stop the real problem, which is the use of illegal fireworks, the type that shoot up into the air.

A better idea is to raise the tax and use some of the revenue — much less than would be needed to fund youth sports — to increase the enforcement of the laws against illegal fireworks.

The mayor also did not comment on Dixon’s suggestion to let voters decide on the fireworks issue.

Perhaps he agrees with Dixon on that one, too, but he could not bring himself to say so publicly. Or perhaps the mayor did not address the issue because in his perfect world, there are no problems.