ON THE TOWN:Mansoor and especially Leece should know better

There are no more illegal immigrants in Costa Mesa. There is no more crime, either. All of the development issues have been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction and the Westside of the city is perfect.

Costa Mesa gangs are gone, too. There is no trash anywhere. Traffic moves freely everywhere, and city coffers have a multimillion-dollar surplus.

You’d have walked away with the same impression if you had witnessed Tuesday’s City Council meeting.

After stumbling through his opening remarks on a really important subject and mumbling something about it being a “past practice,” Mayor Allan Mansoor said, “I would like to request that council member [Linda] Dixon and council member [Wendy] Leece switch seats.”

Mansoor’s smokescreen rationale for this musical chairs was to give Leece the opportunity to sit next to City Manager Allan Roeder so that she could ask him questions. Being the newest member of the City Council, this was presented as a plus.

I have been a senior executive in management for more than 20 years, including five years as a smallbusiness owner, and one thing I have found over the years is that you can tell an awful lot about someone’s gray matter and their potential by the questions they ask.

So if Leece has questions for Roeder, she can ask them out loud so we can all hear and determine whether we have a keeper.

That lame excuse is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who saw this sorry display of “leadership.”

But that wasn’t the end of it. In response, Dixon declined to move.

Mansoor responded by defying a timeless management rule — the one that says it’s a bad idea to try to ram an idea down someone’s throat; that in order to achieve true progress and build a consensus, it’s better to build in a “win” for an opposing party or at least make them believe they had a hand in the final decision.

That’s what leaders do. But Costa Mesans do not have a leader as their mayor, they have a petty, small-thinking individual — someone who can’t inspire change so he tries ham-handed attempts to force it.

What did Mansoor do next? Unable to force Dixon to move, he requested that this crucial matter be placed on the agenda. That’s the Mansoor equivalent of taking his ball and going home.

Great. Now, we have to waste the public’s time and money discussing who sits where.

Mansoor is disingenuous at best. He no more wants this seating arrangement for Leece’s benefit than he wants an illegal immigrant civil rights advisory committee. This request is simply a way to separate the majority from the minority, and if he had the courage, he’d say so. Instead, we find him hiding behind the skirts of “past practice.”

Well, Mr. Mayor, it may have been past practice, but that was another City Council makeup, and this is now.

After all this time, Mansoor still has not learned that the key to progress is not cracking your baton over the head of a colleague. Meaningful, long-term progress comes when you can get your colleagues, even those who often disagree with you, to share your vision. But the mayor has no vision. He has only an agenda — one that moves from meeting to meeting where he acts out his imperial fantasies for all to see.

My biggest disappointment was not with Mansoor. I expect this sort of amateurish behavior from him. My sadness lies in Leece’s going along with this whole charade and making public comments about supporting it.

Leece should know what it’s like to be the repeated victim of petty sniping and slights by the majority, not because they have any real value, but because someone just wants to hurt you.

That is what happened time after time when she was on the school board.

Leece should have told Mansoor privately to drop it if for no other reason than she is sympathetic to Dixon’s situation.

I am buoyed only by the fact that as of Friday evening, the Daily Pilot online poll shows that 71% of respondents think that this matter is too small to be worthy of discussion.

There are a few people who are going to try to shift the blame to Dixon. I will remind them that the mayor raised this issue, not Dixon, and that Leece had not complained about her seat assignment before Tuesday.

The mayor opened Tuesday’s meeting with a “thank you” to all of the members of the armed forces who are protecting us overseas. But moments later, the mayor dishonored these people, who are staring in the face of death 24/7, by throwing a tantrum at City Hall over the council’s seating arrangement.

Tell me, Mr. Mayor, would you be proud to give this report to our soldiers?