Rosansky wrapping up the year, his things

Councilman Steve Rosansky hauled a stack of flattened cardboard boxes and a roll of packing tape into City Hall earlier this week to clear out his various knickknacks and photographs from the mayor’s office.

There’s the “mayoral humidor” stocked with stogies complete with personalized cigar bands, the framed picture he took with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani earlier this year and the pencils he hands out to school children with “Mayor Rosansky” stamped on them. Rosansky’s tumultuous yearlong mayoral term has come to an end.

During the past year, he’s battled allegations of impropriety from rehabilitation home activists, clashed with other council members over where the next city hall should go and helped negotiate a roughly $43-million development agreement with the Irvine Co.

But the former mayor says his most important job has been to listen to people.

“People will call about the parking meter in front of their house or if they’re having a dispute with their neighbor, a lot of times they just want someone to listen,” he said.

Among his running a Togo’s and Baskin-Robbins franchise in Orange with his wife, his real estate business and his duties as a councilman, he estimates he works anywhere from 80 to 90 hours a week.

“I guess you could consider government my hobby,” Rosansky said. “It’s good to be mayor.”

Rosansky has taken hits from rehab home activists for providing property management services for an old friend who leased a Newport Beach duplex to a man who ran a rehabilitation home in Costa Mesa.

An investigation by the city’s independent legal counsel found Rosansky had no conflict of interest in regulating rehab homes and absolved him of any wrongdoing, but some activists are still unhappy.

“It’s unfortunate that the lasting image we will have of Rosansky’s term as mayor is one of his lashing out during council meetings at the community who demanded his honesty, while he attempted to conceal his three-year, for-profit contractual relationship with a drug rehab operator and many people in his own district suffered terribly from rehab overconcentration,” said activist Bob Rush, who has been the former mayor’s most vocal critic over the past year.

Rosansky has taken an active role in creating a new ordinance to curb what activists say is an epidemic of rehabilitation homes in Newport areas. He also organized a statewide forum on the rehab issue in March that representatives from more than 100 California cities attended.

“It’s because I’m actually doing something about the problem,” Rosansky said. “If you extend yourself, you open yourself up to criticism.”

Councilman Keith Curry has criticized Rosansky in the past for his support of building the next city hall next to the central library on Avocado Avenue. The two council members flamed each other in editorials in the Daily Pilot earlier this year.

In one newsprint exchange, Curry called a letter Rosansky wrote to the Pilot in August “a failure of leadership and consensus building.” Rosansky’s earlier letter attacked Curry’s opinion that the site next to the library should be reserved for a park.

Curry has since apologized publicly to Rosansky for his remarks and declined to comment on Rosansky for this story.

“It’s not so much that we don’t get along as we have different ideas on things,” Rosansky said of Curry. “I’m not one to let things go.”

Other’s say they admire Rosansky’s outspokenness.

“I thought Steve showed a lot of courage in his support of city hall in the park,” Councilwoman Leslie Daigle said.

Rosansky is looking forward to continue serving as councilman in the new year. He enjoys the behind-the-scenes work that gets little recognition like approving new traffic medians and parks.

“It’s shaping the city,” Rosansky said. “It’s nice to drive by something and say, ‘I had a hand in that.’”