It would be hard for Allan Mansoor to top 2006.
He won a second term as mayor of Costa Mesa. He set the agenda for a determined, unswerving majority on the City Council. Most of all, he was the face the city showed the world and his was the voice that was heard from Costa Mesa when it was thrust into the national debate over illegal immigration.
And all he had to do, like lighting a fuse, was make a modest proposal that exploded into controversy — and then watch the results.
Coming into this year, Mansoor already had helped move an agenda that for some earlier councils would have been a pipedream. The job center closed at the end of 2005, a move some residents had demanded for years, and this year in a unanimous vote — rare since the 2004 election — the council voted for an ambitious plan that would allow, but not coerce, redevelopment on the Westside.
A crucial ingredient to Mansoor's success, and what separated the 2005-06 council from earlier ones, to resident Chris Blank, was another councilman's shifting politics.
"To me, the biggest difference is [former Councilman and Mayor] Gary Monahan went from being somewhat moderate to kind of on the far edge, as far as I'm concerned," said Blank, an attorney who became a regular at council meetings in 2006. "It was Monahan's support that allowed Mansoor to have a majority for some of the things that in my opinion were most controversial."
At the sole council meeting in December 2005, with no prior study session or discussion, Mansoor proposed that Costa Mesa become the first city to have its police trained to enforce federal immigration law and to enforce it widely against people suspected of breaking laws — whether they were jaywalking or robbing a bank.
It was, in fact, Monahan's spur-of-the-moment compromise that the council approved in a split vote: to limit the number of officers with immigration powers to those in the jail, the gang detail and a few others. The first council meeting in January, after people had several weeks to stew over the idea, was packed with supporters and critics. A protester was arrested. But Mansoor met the turmoil with the same answer he would give all year long: The federal government had failed to uphold the law regarding illegal immigration, so it was right for the city to step in and do it.
