As with much of surrounding Orange County, the in-between spaces are a beige blur of developments and office parks bermed out with Marathon Sod and lone crape myrtles. Pointing to their biker gangs and their barrio, Costa Mesans describe the city as diverse, tolerant, and—though it is heavily Republican—democratic.
What served as a civic nucleus, until recently, was City Hall. But City Hall is now under fire from the budget-slashing wing of the Republican establishment, in a war of words and pink slips reminiscent of an earlier anti-union era, when the Pinkertons battered the Wobblies with fists and clubs. Local budget deficits are a national problem. One glaring contributor to the problem is growing pension payments. The consequences of chronic underfunding for small cities like Central Falls, Rhode Island, are dire: in July, a state-appointed receiver cajoled retired municipal employees to forgo up to half their retirement benefits, or face a worse clawback when the city declared bankruptcy as it did a few weeks later.
Seeking to fend off budgetary disaster, Republican leaders in Wisconsin recently stripped unions of many of their collective-bargaining rights; in New York, where government pension costs grew tenfold during the past decade, to fifteen billion dollars, the Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, wants to raise the minimum retirement age for government employees by as much as eight years. In Costa Mesa, the budget battle was gladly taken up by a new city council, driven by Jim Righeimer, a backslapping real-estate developer whose burly physique and eagerness to scrap call to mind Friar Tuck.
Apprehending trouble, the police association spent sixty-eight thousand dollars on campaign ads attacking Righeimer, even as six other unions from nearby cities poured in additional funds.
The association also obtained the domain name righeimer. Righeimer found an ally in another new councilman, Steve Mensinger. Mensinger, also a developer, is a rangy, self-assured man who heads the local Pop Warner league. Costa Mesa has a traditional council-manager government, in which an elected council determines policy and an appointed city manager runs day-to-day operations. In January, with the city facing a projected five-million-dollar deficit, Righeimer began working with Monahan on a secret plan to slash the budget.
