The numbers don’t belie

S.J. CAHN

The most shocking thing about the final vote tallies from Newport

Beach and Costa Mesa is that there isn’t much shock to them.

Perhaps the closest result to a surprise in the breakdown of

precinct-by-precinct voting is that in Costa Mesa, Planning

Commissioner Eric Bever, the “Westside improver” candidate, didn’t

handily trounce the opposition on the Westside. He trailed the top

two vote-getters, Planning Commissioner Katrina Foley and former

Mayor Linda Dixon, in those areas. And while the Westside provided

more than his 44-vote lead over colleague Bruce Garlich, the votes

between them even there were close.

Bever, as a reminder, has 10,139 votes to Garlich’s 10,095. Friday

at 5 p.m. is the deadline for anyone to order a recount.

Beyond that, though, Newport’s Measure L, which did get trounced

citywide, failed to win a single part of town. Typically,

slow-growth, Greenlight-backed measures haven’t done as well in

Newport Coast, but this time opposition was consistent and

widespread. About the strongest support was Big Canyon to the Port

streets, but even there the vote tended to be about 3 to 2 against.

(Measure L ended up losing by about 2 to 1 and in some parts of town

lost by nearly 5 to 2.)

In other non-surprises, anti-Measure L candidate John Buttolph,

who ran against eventual winner Steve Rosansky and Catherine Emmons,

fared best on the Balboa Peninsula, where the Marinapark issue

literally hit closest to home. He also did well around Newport Harbor

High, for some reason. He didn’t carry any precincts, though.

In fact, in Newport Beach, incumbents did well across the boards.

Dolores Otting, who put up the best fight by a challenger in

gathering 17,108 votes to incumbent John Heffernan’s 20,233, took the

only precincts won by a challenger. A strong area for her was West

Newport, at the opposite end of town from her home district, and the

peninsula, where her Greenlight backing might have swayed some

voters.

What do these results suggest? My gut reaction is that, out of the

three elections in Newport-Mesa I’ve followed (and I know that’s

significantly fewer than a lot of readers), this one shows the most

like-minded electorate yet. There are no clear divisions in Costa

Mesa among the Eastside, Westside and Mesa Verde, and no one

candidate did especially well in one part of town. There is no

standout Greenlight conclave in Newport. There are no parts of

Newport especially unhappy with their council representation.

In Costa Mesa, it’s true, two incumbents did lose their seats. But

those losses are also consistent across town. And the winners drew

strongly from all areas.

I won’t go as far as suggesting there’s a mandate for any of our

elected officials (other than Councilman Steve Bromberg, but mainly

to upset the people who insist he didn’t get 100% of the vote!), but

there does seem to be agreement on who should be leading our two

cities.

And that, I think, isn’t a bad place for city leaders to start.

Finally, there’s the question that has come up in the past two

Costa Mesa elections: Did anyone cast “bullet votes,” in which voters

choose just one candidate when they can pick multiple people -- as in

the choice this year of three for the City Council? Evidence

suggested that Chris Steel benefited from bullet voting in 2000,

though there is no way to prove it occurred.

Here are this year’s numbers. Costa Mesa voters cast 39,192 votes.

Tripling that for the three council seats, there should have been

117,576 votes. The total number of votes cast for council candidates?

Just 84,216.

As suspect as that looks, it’s impossible to read an answer

definitively. A lot of people simply don’t vote for council

candidates, as evidenced by the varying totals in Newport Beach,

where the unchallenged Bromberg received 32,804 votes compared with

47,240 cast. Even the hotly contested Measure L vote totaled only

44,795.

But did 44 people in Costa Mesa cast a ballot only for Bever? That

we’ll never know.

* S.J. CAHN is the managing editor. He may be reached at (714)

966-4607 or by e-mail at [email protected].