ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Costa Mesa Should Take a Few Days Off

Last week was not the best of weeks for Costa Mesa’s City Council. The council found itself overruled by Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp on the same day it was told by an Orange County Superior Court commissioner that one of its ordinances was “ill-designed.” As if that weren’t enough, a council funding decision on a third matter left the artistic director of the South Coast Repertory theater, in his words, “flummoxed and dumbfounded.”

So this week, after being reversed and after spreading confusion, the city fathers might want to consider dropping back a few yards in order to lighten things up a bit. Two of the instances had to do with the city’s previous and well-publicized forays into the risky territory of immigration policy. The lesson from these decisions is that if the council wants to avoid being overruled by the courts and by Cabinet-level officers--and, indeed, if it wants to avoid a certain amount of embarrassment--it ought to leave immigration matters to the federal government.

The Kemp ruling was to be expected because the secretary had previously suspended a ruling issued by his counsel in response to a Costa Mesa ordinance. The ordinance was a clear attempt to make charities do the unpleasant work of screening for illegal immigrants. The bottom line on Kemp’s ruling was that after taking a good look at his lawyer’s opinion, the secretary confirmed his own instinct that such a local ordinance would be unfair.

In the second matter, the commissioner, like Kemp, found a flaw in the city’s attempt to wage immigration policy. He found unconstitutional a city ordinance prohibiting dayworkers from going to designated areas of the city, presumably with the “intent” of soliciting work. The ordinance, another city effort arising out of frustration with immigration problems, was a clear and dangerous intrusion on First Amendment rights.

And finally the council made a mystifying decision to delay the distribution of cultural arts grants because South Coast Repertory, a beneficiary, had expressed its support in flyers for the National Endowment for the Arts, an organization embroiled in national controversy over artistic license. It was hard to fathom the mayor’s argument that by asking patrons to support an endowment that gives it financial support, the theater was making a political statement.

A new week offers Costa Mesa a chance to correct some of the old mistakes and chart a corrective course.