Longtime local returns to political life

COSTA MESA — Reading the fact in print might make her blush, but new Costa Mesa City Councilwoman Wendy Leece has risque newspapers to thank for starting her public service career.

Leece, 58, was sworn in Tuesday as a council member, after winning 24.4% of the votes in the Nov. 7 council election.

Her new job goes onto a long resume: She’s a mother and a grandmother, and a former member of the Newport-Mesa school board and the city parks commission, and she has worked as a teacher and construction project administrator.

She’s lived in the city since 1972, always on the Westside. Her activism started in the mid-1980s when she and some other parents noticed a proliferation of newsstands, some of which sold adult publications.

So they got a petition signed, and soon the council passed a new rule requiring the machines with racy material to cover most of it up “so the kids would not be enticed,” Leece said. The machines also had to be kept in good working order so children could not just pull them open.

“We felt that it was a way to protect not just our own kids, but it was a risk and danger to all of our kids,” she said.

After that victory, she was encouraged to run for the Newport-Mesa school board in 1989. She lost her first time out, but in 1994 she tried again and won, eventually serving eight years on the board.

Meanwhile, she was sometimes home-schooling her five children, and when her husband, an architect, died in 1999, she had to parent them alone.

“I’m not one of these people that went into a career right after college and just stayed there. My experience as an activist and a community volunteer has been broad-based,” Leece said in an interview that highlighted her busy schedule — it began in her car Tuesday as she picked up her youngest daughter, 17-year-old Emily, from school and continued in her living room a few hours before her first council meeting.

Leece has been on the parks commission for three years, but she decided this fall to try for a council seat and ended up as Mayor Allan Mansoor’s chosen running mate.

Part of her reason for running, she said, was to be the third vote that cements the conservative majority on the council, but she’s nobody’s puppet.

“I’m sure Allan and I will disagree on a lot of things,” she said. “We have basic core values that we do have in agreement, but each issue is different…. I definitely am my own person, and I think people know that.”

Leece describes herself as a doer — she even has the city’s graffiti hotline programmed into her cellphone — and her supporters would likely agree.

Parks commission veteran Mark Harris has a healthy respect for Leece after serving with her on the commission and seeing how hard she worked during the campaign, he said.

“She’s just a real down-to-earth person that looks at all the issues very closely, and she does her homework,” Harris said.

She also stood up for property rights when the commission was deciding whether to put lights on more fields at the Farm Sports Complex, he said. Some neighbors complained about the effect lights would have on their properties, and Leece listened to them, Harris said.

Not everyone agreed with that decision, however, and Leece will probably face more controversy on the council. Some residents have said the Latino community was made to feel unwelcome by the council’s politics, namely a plan to train police for immigration enforcement.

But Leece said people who were upset by the proposal didn’t understand it. The Police Department has a program to help start neighborhood watch groups, and that’s the best olive branch to concerned groups, she said.

“I don’t think the city’s in the business of holding hands or making people less fearful, other than this neighborhood watch program,” she said.

With Leece on the dais, the five-member council now has a female majority, and that could make for some interesting dynamics. She already has reached out to Councilwomen Linda Dixon and Katrina Foley, who have often been on the short end of 3-2 vote splits in the last two years.

Leece campaigned with a conservative platform that mirrored Mansoor’s, but she has some things in common with her female colleagues that the men on the council don’t share, Foley said. For example, the councilwomen are family women with children, and they’ve been active community volunteers.

Foley said she feels positive about a recent meeting with Leece, who took the initiative to set it up and to find out about what projects Foley wants to work on in the coming months.

“I have to take her at her word at this point that she really, sincerely does want to work together and find some common ground, and I feel very good about that,” Foley said.