POLITICS ASIDE:

As I was sitting at lunch Tuesday with Wendy Leece, I realized that eating at Memphis in the Sobeca part of town was about the perfect spot to be meeting with a Costa Mesa City Council candidate.

Sobeca, or South Bristol Entertainment and Cultural Arts as the redeveloped area around Bristol is called, is the poster area for a new vision for the city. And vision was much on Leece’s mind.

But before that vision, let’s back up a bit. Leece, for those with short memories or those new to town, was an outspoken member of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District for eight years before losing her seat four years ago.

Leece, of course, made for good copy. She’d talk about the Ten Commandments, we’d have a story. She’s encourage a fellow trustee to resign his seat, we’d have a story.

While Leece was on the board, that beat was the hottest at this paper. But it wasn’t just because she constantly hit on hot-button issues. Leece also was a good source for our reporters, and by that I mean she knew what was going on in the district and, bless her heart, was willing to share those thoughts with us.

As I told her during lunch, I’d consider her a “friend of the Pilot” for her time on the board (perhaps printing that will take votes away; if so, sorry, Wendy!), followed by contributing to our former parenting column for a few years.

We even endorsed Leece four years ago in her unsuccessful reelection bid.

Now, of course, Leece is running for City Council and essentially is on the side with Mayor Allan Mansoor and opposing planning commissioner Bruce Garlich and former Councilman Mike Scheafer.

That’s the easy way to conceive of the race. And such easy ways — too easy, of course — of reporting news was one of the issues we talked about.

Clearly, the council race in Costa Mesa is going to be hard-fought and probably bitter. And there will be many times that all sides will use shorthand to try to depict the opposition and times when, for clarity and ease, the Pilot will have to go with the simplest descriptions possible.

Are those descriptions perfect? No. But over the course of our coverage of the race, as I told Leece, we will be looking in depth at the important issues that will define the debate.

The “vision” for Costa Mesa probably is the central issue. How should the city redevelop areas such as Sobeca and especially the Westside? What should that redevelopment include? How will housing be addressed? What about business?

“I just believe Costa Mesa has a lot of potential,” Leece told me as we talked about these things.

Leece brings an interesting perspective to this race. She knows about the schools and long focused on the poorest-performing schools in the district that happen to be on the Westside where she lives. She can make a case for being a candidate who can help the district and the city work together, though she would bring the baggage of having been the outsider on the board of trustees.

But she can’t just focus on education, though she points out that improving the educational opportunities in Costa Mesa is a way of improving the rest of town.

Her other big issues are public safety and how best to deploy officers; creating a friendly environment in the city’s planning department that encourages businesses to come to town; figuring out how to bring live/work development to the city; and traffic (which ties into any development).

Leece also mentioned that she hopes a senior-oriented development could go into where Kona Lanes was on Harbor Boulevard. Interesting.

Readers will hear plenty more about her positions on such issues. One last thing, though. Leece mentioned more than once how the community’s eclectic nature and multiculturalism is a strength. “It makes Costa Mesa unique.”

Somewhere in those thoughts is a core of agreement I bet all the candidates for the council have.

TRAINED TO PROVIDE THE NEWS

Because I was on vacation last week, I unfortunately didn’t get to hear immediately Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor’s comments about the Pilot and its editors who, he believes, twisted his words in a story that followed the sad shooting death of Israel Maciel earlier this month.

The mayor can think there was all the twisting that he wants. Sure, stories change during the editing process for clarity, style and ease of reading. But we don’t change things to hype some agenda. It just doesn’t happen.

I don’t expect everyone to believe that, but it doesn’t change that it’s true.

But I do want to respond to the silly charge I hear about people at the Pilot not living in the community. That one has been leveled best at our publisher, Tom Johnson, who has lived in Newport Beach for years while still hearing that accusation.

It’s always good for a laugh when someone claims he lives in Irvine.

It’s true that many members of the Pilot editorial staff don’t live in Newport-Mesa. A few do and always have. The rest of us typically can’t afford the rents (and certainly not the home prices).

But, as I told Leece during our lunch, this charge misses a critical point by equating living here with understanding or concern for the community. As journalists, we are trained to cover, react to and be part of the community we are in. Just as scientists know the intricacies of their specialties or roofers know best (I hope!) how to handle nail guns, we are trained to think about and present news and events to readers. We spend, on average, more than eights hours a day thinking about what is going on in Newport-Mesa, talking about the issues here and then writing and editing stories about those issues.

That is our job. We are immersed in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. I think we are far more immersed than most people, which is as it should be because we are the ones delivering the news to the community.

And we do as thoughtful, thorough and careful a job of that as possible. And I think we do a pretty good job at it too. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this column.