Presiding over a changing Newport

If you’d asked him 30 years ago, Steve Rosansky would never have thought he’d someday be a mayor.

He wasn’t popular in high school, and he was shy about speaking in front of groups. But something happened about 11 years ago.

“My wife came home and said, ‘We’ve got a new leader for our Cub Scout troop,’ and I said, ‘Who is it?’ She said, ‘It’s you,’ ” Rosansky remembered. “I started with the little people and moved up to the big people.”

Rosansky, 47, is in his fourth year on the council and finishing his first full month as mayor, after taking the gavel in December.

It should be a notable year — Rosansky has called for a statewide conference in early March to discuss the issue of drug recovery homes in residential areas, and he set a June 30 deadline for the council to finally choose a city hall site.

The city hall decision has been hung up for several years, after the council faced public questions about plans to rebuild the existing City Hall on the Balboa Peninsula.

The council has organized committees and conducted studies, but with no definitive result.

Now, Rosansky and other council members are ready to make a decision. As of last week, there were four sites under consideration: the peninsula site and three spots in Newport Center — the city police station plot on Santa Barbara Drive; the Orange County Museum of Art, which is expected to move to Costa Mesa; and an Orange County Transportation Authority bus terminal on San Nicolas Drive.

The city also is beginning to write the rules that will put the new general plan in place, and the council last week agreed to find out what’s needed to get the city’s 25-year-old traffic signal system updated and synchronized — probably a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project.

In West Newport, where Rosansky lives, he wants to work on a “vision plan” to beautify the area, which is the northern gateway to Newport Beach. Medians are planned for Superior Avenue, and Rosansky said he’d like to see the medians on West Coast Highway refurbished.

He’ll likely talk about some of these issues on Wednesday, when he speaks to the West Newport Beach Assn., and in February during his address at the annual mayor’s dinner.

He doesn’t mind public speaking like he used to. One of the parts he likes about being mayor is the adopt-a-pet show he does for the city’s cable TV channel. It’s certainly a reversal from his school days.

“When I was in elementary school and the class did a play,” he said, “I was always the stagehand.”