Outcome of challenge to Costa Mesa mayor’s candidate statement may affect Newport council hopeful as well

Costa Mesa Mayor Sandy Genis isn’t the only candidate in local November elections keeping a close eye on the outcome of a legal challenge to parts of her candidate statement.

Joy Brenner, who is running for Newport Beach City Council, wrote a passage in her own statement that is similar to Genis’ yet was removed by the Newport city clerk, who said it violated California elections code.

Wendy Leece, a Costa Mesa resident and former City Council member, filed a petition last week aiming to strike roughly a third of Genis’ statement, alleging that certain portions are false, misleading and improperly reference and denigrate Genis’ opponent in the mayoral race, Councilwoman Katrina Foley. A hearing is scheduled for Sept. 7 in Orange County Superior Court to determine whether the disputed passages should be deleted.

Brenner’s advocates say that if Genis prevails and her statement is left unchanged, the passages removed from Brenner’s statement should be restored.

Candidate statements are printed in the Voter Information Guide, also known as the sample ballot. They are not printed on the final ballot.

Genis’ statement reads: “Costa Mesa residents have the right to clean, open government and decisions free of cronyism. No backroom deals.”

Brenner’s original statement said: “We must stop playing partisan politics, which have no place in city governance. Pushed by a political agenda and outside forces, they lead to backroom deals and obscure the public’s right to know. No more deals for political cronies. No more ‘staff reorganizations’ that diminish public services.”

Newport City Clerk Leilani Brown rejected that portion of Brenner’s statement, saying it appears to reference other candidates and that the statement should focus only on its author.

Leece made a similar argument about Genis.

Brown, in fact, rejected portions of four council candidates’ statements, saying all had “clearly [gone] beyond what is allowable.”

Brown told Brenner’s District 6 opponent, incumbent Scott Peotter, that she would excise a paragraph saying previous council members had “used a loophole in Proposition 13 to finance the $142-million Taj-Ma-City-Hall project without a vote of the people.”

Brown told District 3 incumbent and current Mayor Marshall “Duffy” Duffield that she would remove a reference he made to “prior bad decisions of previous councils” leading to residential development displacing public waterfront spaces and marine businesses.

And she told District 4 challenger Roy Englebrecht that she would remove his claim that the current council is “not addressing any kind of pension reform, not addressing any kind of out-of-control city employee problems” and that a council should “never treat a city employee like the current City Council treated City Manager Dave Kiff.”

Brenner said Monday that she was disappointed by the edits to her statement but decided not to spend time and energy on a legal challenge and instead focus on her campaign.

She said she was surprised after seeing the similarities to the Costa Mesa case.

Over the weekend, Newport Beach activist Susan Skinner sent an email to Brown saying that if Superior Court Judge Robert Moss rules that Genis’ statement does not violate the same section of elections code that Brown used to edit Brenner’s statement, she should restore the paragraphs she removed.

Skinner said Monday that she is not involved with Brenner’s campaign and that all Newport candidates whose statements were edited should get to undo the changes if Genis prevails.

“If Susan’s points are correct and the judge agrees, then I would be very happy if Leilani chose to accept my original statement as written,” Brenner said.

Genis and Leece said in phone interviews Monday that there have been talks aimed at ending their dispute and that they were hopeful an agreement could be reached.

Leece said Genis “has agreed to delete some statements, but we’re still negotiating.” She declined to offer details.

Genis said she’s “open to making a couple of semantic changes, but I stand by what I wrote.”

Leece also objected to several other parts of Genis’ candidate statement, including claims that Genis was the “only mayoral candidate to stand up against [the] Orange County Needle Exchange Program in state review” and the only candidate to “vote to protect single-family neighborhoods from wholesale duplex conversion.”

In each case, Leece alleges the assertions are false and misleading because they either misstate Councilwoman Foley’s previous votes and public statements or contain inaccurate information.

Genis, though, maintained last week that her statement is accurate and said Leece’s petition was “simply intended as a distraction to take away from the issues we should be looking at in the campaign.”

Along with the mayor’s position, three City Council seats are up for grabs in Costa Mesa this fall.

City Clerk Brenda Green said Monday that “no other candidate statements were requested to be edited during the review period” and none have been challenged in the same way as Genis’.

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