Is it really August? It doesn’t seem like it in Costa Mesa: it’s a shockingly busy week, with meetings and items coming in at a mid-Fall or mid-Spring clip.

If this is how Interim City Manager Cecilia Gallardo-Daly rolls, I like it.

Working backward through the week, let’s start with the Arts Commission, which has the modest task this coming Thursday of reviewing and commenting on the entire scope of the Arts & Cultural Master Plan for the next five years. I’m sure it sounds hyperbolic to say but: this is probably one of the city’s most important cultural fights, and it is flying completely under the radar.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the last round of Arts spending focused on art services and events — which presupposes that arts funding should be spent at least in part on city personnel — rather than art installations. This led to some pointed questioning from the dais, in public comment, and in the press. If you have a dog in this fight, I highly recommend tuning into this conversation.

On Wednesday the Active Transportation Committee will meet, which is humming along even as pretty much every other committee is on something of a Summer break. While the agenda seems fairly uninteresting, I would love to drop in on the conversation regarding Caltrans’s upcoming project to “improve” Newport Boulevard. The same project is the subject of a Consent Calendar item at the City Council this evening calling on Caltrans to do a better job addressing the clear safety issues with the Newport Boulevard corridor. It would be great to hear more directly from Staff what the negotiations with Caltrans have been like. So attend this one if street safety is your thing.

And that brings us to tonight’s meeting.

City Council: Housing, Immigration, and Fairview Park

It’s pretty rare for City Council meetings to simultaneously address not just one, not two, but three huge issues facing the city. And it’s rarer still for that meeting to happen in the middle of the Summer. Yet, here we are.

Housing: a Punt, a Portent (?), and a Pedestrian Problem

First up: There are three (!) large housing projects under consideration. The biggest, the ongoing “Hive Live” project up on Susan Street, will get another continuance, meaning it won’t be discussed tonight. This is in part due to a request from Council Member Mike Buley last meeting, as he requested the City Council wait to address this one until he returned from vacation. However, given that this will be this project’s second continuance, one wonders: is there a development agreement in the works with the City behind the scenes? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Then we have the second reading of the rezoning approved last meeting for the 44 condos at Victoria Place, located right at the elbow of Victoria and Newport Boulevard. I skipped this discussion in favor of spilling more digital ink on the ICE debacle last meeting, but it really does deserve some space of its own. The quick version is that the proposed project is a fairly typical condo/townhouse development that a developer is trying to squeeze into one of the most cursed intersections in Costa Mesa, which also happens to be a Measure K site (recall those sites are the ones subject to a major city rezoning – someday). To accomplish this, the developer tried to hodge-podge together standards from several overlapping code sections, and, because those sections are themselves contradictory, it came up with a project that was simultaneously at odds with all of them.

This approach got the project in hot water with the Planning Commission, which voted 5-2 to reject the project. Remarkably, the 5-person majority contained both Jon Zich, an avowed housing crisis skeptic but also someone deeply worried about our poor renter-to-homeowner ratio, and David Martinez and Jeff Harlan, both of whom are outspoken housing advocates. In fact, they aren’t just pro-housing: Martinez campaigned for Measure K, and Harlan basically wrote the damn thing.

So when the three of them get together to vote down an ownership housing project in a Measure K site, it makes me sit up straight.

More remarkable still, we had Planning Commissioner Rob Dickson, a fierce Measure K opponent, vote in favor of the project, even though he didn’t carry the day.

I won’t bog this entry down with an analysis of the Planning Commission’s decision, which, given its mandate, it probably got right. But I must emphasize is that, once this item got to the City Council, every council member had as much political cover as they could ask for to vote this project down. That goes double for the on-paper “housing skeptical” Council Members Jeff Pettis and Mike Buley, who weren’t even on the Council for the project’s initial screening presentation last year and thus didn’t even have a prior approving vote weighing on them.

And yet: the Victoria Place project was approved — General Plan amendment, traffic management concerns, zoning confusion, Measure K-gun jumping and all — on a seven-to-nothing vote. A seven-to-nothing vote.

Is this a sign that we might actually have a, *gasp*, “pro-housing Council”? Lest I do damage by trying to speak that into existence, let’s move on.

Finally, there will be yet another discussion of the proposed condos at the former Trinity Broadcasting Network site, which has been discussed here and in the local press before. I expect the bulk of the discussion to center around whether the project will require a public pedestrian gate be installed with access to Olympic Avenue. The purpose of the gate is, ostensibly, to allow pedestrians coming from Olympic to walk through the development to access Shiffer Park.

It’s a lovely idea — except that the Olympic Avenue residents have surmised that this gate will also allow the development’s residents to park there, rather than in the development’s designated spots. So I expect much of the item’s time to be taken up on this issue.

Immigration: is backing SB 805 the answer?

In it’s first item related to calls (and jeers) from the public to address ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the city sweeping up undocumented residents, the city has brought forward a resolution to “affirm the city’s values” and to sign on to support SB 805, a California bill entitled the “No Vigilantes Act”. While the bill enhances penalties for individuals impersonating law enforcement officers, it also imposes a state requirement for law enforcement (including ICE) operating in the state to identify themselves by last name, badge or an I.D. number.

As I’ve written before, State regulation of Federal law enforcement practices is generally a no-no under the Constitution’s Supremacy clause. But don’t take my word for it. The bill’s own legislative analysis put it thus:

Here, requiring all federal law enforcement personnel to wear visible identification while operating in California, whereby violations SB 805 may be punished as a misdemeanor, may be considered to conflict with the narrower federal regulatory requirement that immigration officers simply identify themselves at the time of arrest. Moreover, given that this bill’s identification requirement applies to all federal law enforcement personnel, not only federal immigration officers, this requirement may also conflict with other federal statutes that establish identification requirements for nonimmigration federal law enforcement personnel.

Yes, the bill contains a severability clause, which means that even if the regulation ends up being struck down as-applied to federal law enforcement, the remainder of the law increasing penalties for civilians impersonating law enforcement will remain in place.

But honestly, I think SB 805 is a cold comfort to the folks who came to the microphones last meeting, begging the city for help. The problem with SB 805 is that the bits of it that are constitutional aren’t all that relevant to the city’s problems — it isn’t suffering from an epidemic of ICE impersonators, but rather from the fallout from bona fide ICE activity — and the bits that actually do address federal activity will likely be invalidated by federal courts.

And that is because trying to regulate federal activity with state law is a bit like bringing a knife to a gun fight. State law simply isn’t up to the task, especially in area where federal authority is pretty clear.

Now, to me, asserting federal rights in federal courts addresses the issue more directly and with a greater chance of influencing actual behavior. Which is why I was not surprised to see not only Santa Ana and Anaheim, but now also Irvine, taking steps to join the Vasquez Perdomo case.

And let me show some more of my cards: I think that would be a good thing if more cities followed suit. By doing so, Orange County would say, with one voice, that it will not hinder ICE’s activities so long as it carries on its business constitutionally. This strikes the right balance between fidelity to the law and the accepting the consequences of elections, on the one hand, and fiercely defending residents’ rights on the other. It also bows to political reality. No matter what any partisan may wish, we are a purple city in a purple county. We aren’t all going to agree on immigration policy. But we can agree that the Constitution is the law of the land, and that while it vests great power in the federal government, it also burdens it with great responsibility.

It will be interesting to see what the City Council does with the Staff recommendation. And, on another note, will we see a repeat of the other night’s theatrics from local pro-ICE activists? Well, positioning this item after several big housing matters will help. They’ll have to chug some coffee to get to disrupt things this time.

And Finally: Fairview Park finds a restoration contractor and adds Crotch’s Bumble Bee and the Western Burrowing Owl to its panoply of protected species

While this item isn’t all that interesting — it’s good that we’ve finally found a contractor to do some of the grant-funded restoration work in the park, I guess — it may end up serving as a preview of coming fights over the long-awaited Fairview Park Master Plan. That plan has been in the works for what feels like years now, though I’m hearing that it will come to the City Council this Fall.

Will some of that pent-up anxiety spill over into public comments on this item? I guess we will have to see if anyone is still awake.