COSTA MESA UNPLUGGED:

A grade-school lad overheard his pop chatting about a moratorium. “That’s where they bury dead people,” he told his sister with rock-solid certainty. Older by a few years, the lass inquired of her brother where it is exactly that they bury live people.

The boy shrugged.

For big people who own property in Costa Mesa, there is no blissful ignorance in what a moratorium really means. It’s not where you bury the departed. But it’s certainly the government power that buries plans to improve property and personal economics for a time, and often with a stinging left hook to the wallet. And these days, the Costa Mesa City Council is swinging moratorium punches on a wide arc.

At its May 1 meeting, the City Council extended — with breathtaking nonchalance — a moratorium for six agonizing months on planned conversions of industrial-zoned property to industrial condominiums. Earlier, it blessed a 60-day halt to give city staffers the clock they need to develop rules for these kinds of conversions. The council dispatched the item in less than 10 minutes. And several industrial-property owners with projects already on the boards watched thousands of dollars in pending plans flushed away.

Post vote, one industrial-property owner shot out of his seat and out the doors of the council chambers cursing the action as “unbelievable.”

Now there’s no beef here that the industrial condominium conversion moratorium is necessary. Costa Mesa’s zoning code is void of development standards and review processes for such things. It is, though, unnecessarily and inexplicably late. And so you could steam your vegetables atop the heads of dirt owners who had hoped to improve their properties.

There is fear in their eyes too. That’s because some council members who have never been shy about singing praises from the free-market hymnal seem to be equivocating.

Could it be the free-market, as some council members define it, doesn’t include breaking commercial structures up into industrial condominiums?

Let’s look at the history. In April 2006, the City Council approved a slew of general plan amendments giving birth to the Sobeca, 19 West, Mesa West Bluffs and Mesa West Residential Ownership urban plans. All are creative and forward-thinking blueprints. These and the Westside residential overlay zone weave various canvases on which city revitalization can take place.

At the time — and since — Mayor Allan Mansoor and Councilman Eric Bever in particular lauded these plans as the city’s facilitation of free-market forces to move in and cleanse Costa Mesa’s blighted areas with new, upscale and sustainable mixed-use projects.

Now then, a free market without rules is like giving teenagers the keys to the liquor cabinet. Which leads to the question: Why didn’t the City Council — if not the city’s staff — think of adopting a moratorium at the time the urban plans were approved in April 2006?

Had that occurred, the necessary development standards and review processes with respect to industrial condominium conversions would be hammered out by now. Or one would hope they would be.

But a pretty good book business could be made in this town taking wagers that the council never anticipated that the free market would hatch a gaggle of industrial condominium conversions. Remember, the mantra of Westside improvement has been, in part, the replacement of industrial uses with residential development.

So you have to wonder if, at the end of six months, Costa Mesa will lift the curtain on new development standards that make industrial condominium conversions all but impossible to pull off.

All of this produces a state of mind that property owners loathe: uncertainty.

And the uncertainty is spreading.

At its April 3 meeting, the City Council slapped a 60-day moratorium on apartment-to-condominium conversions. Don’t be shocked if that one is extended six months too.

Apparently in Costa Mesa, the free market isn’t all that free.