EDITORIAL:

It didn’t take long for the first flare-up of the year on the Costa Mesa City Council to ignite. And ignite it did as the majority members — Mayor Allan Mansoor, Wendy Leece and Eric Bever — voted to set aside the creation of a youth-in-government program.

Here’s the background. The youth-in-government program was conceived by Councilwoman Katrina Foley and first got its hearing at the child and youth care services committee and then the parks and recreation committee. Those committees approved the concept of the idea. City staffers helped form it, and 18 students were signed up and had already had a meeting.

Here’s where it gets tricky. All of that happened before the idea was passed on to the council for its final OK.

The reason for that is simple. The aforementioned city staffers apparently didn’t believe that a program of this type warranted such council scrutiny because the youth would have no voting powers. Perhaps that was a mistake, but that was just one of many made in this debacle that has left some young people in this town with a bad lesson on how government works.

Another mistake belongs to the council majority.

Even if this program didn’t follow the proper protocol, the angst and hand-wringing that has occurred since could have been avoided with a few diplomatic statements by those who voted to delay this program.

Allow us to role-play. If we were in charge, this is what we might have said to the 18 teens who had already signed up to be part of this program: “We want to thank you young people for taking such an interest in city government. We need more people like you in our town. Unfortunately, this program hasn’t gone through the proper protocols to be approved, and we are going to need to revisit this at a later date. We apologize for any inconvenience, but hopefully we can get this resolved and move forward at a later date.”

Instead, the teens learned nothing that night. No answer was given about why their program was being scuttled, and they were left wondering if it was dead on arrival.

Regardless of how the council feels about the merits of the program, those teens deserved better from the adults, who seemed more intent on continuing with the petty power struggles that have characterized this council over the past two years. If the youth-ingovernment program is a good idea — and we can’t see why it wouldn’t be — the council should debate its merits and either approve it or vote it down. But one thing is certain, the teens who took the time to take an interest in city government should not be the pawns in this political chess game.