Mr. Clean

Illustration by Bob AulAccording to Allan Mansoor, Costa Mesa is “going in the wrong direction.”

He isn't referring to homosexuals, whom he believes are disproportionately likely to engage in pedophilia. Nor is he talking about the increasing number of Latinos who live on the city's West Side, although he does think that area is too densely populated.

No, the Orange County sheriff's deputy, who also serves on Costa Mesa's Human Relations Commission, says he's running for a City Council seat because he wants to cut taxpayer funding for social programs. Mansoor would like to spend the money fixing potholes, increasing the number of traffic signals, and putting more cops on the beat.

“Obviously, I want the city cleaned up,” he said. “It is something to be very cautious with. . . . We have a lot of blight on the West Side, and the bottom line is we need a city council willing to take the proper steps to cleaning up the city. It's going to start with a lot of the social programs being privately funded, and going back to the basics of good city government.”

Mansoor's vision of “good city government” is to eliminate city funding for programs like soup kitchens or the job center, where Latinos—37 percent of whom, Mansoor says, live outside the city—sit quietly in a parking lot waiting to be picked up by local construction contractors who need cheap manual labor. At the very least, he thinks the job center should be limited to residents.

“If you eliminate the 37 percent of the people from other cities from using the job center, this would eliminate a lot of the loitering,” he argued. “I think social programs should be privately funded. Our city tax dollars and federal tax dollars—by way of Community Development Block Grant funds—have gone to things like the soup kitchen; they receive tax money. I think there is more accountability and better efficiency when [these programs] are privately funded.”

Mansoor couldn't name a privately funded social program in Costa Mesa that is more efficient or more accountable than a taxpayer-funded one. “Well . . . off the top of my head . . . to name a specific one . . . a lot are privately funded, but they receive federal tax money,” he said.

This summer, Mansoor became a target of local civil rights activists who are angry about his presence on the city's Human Relations Commission, which is supposed to oppose things like racism and homophobia. They're angry because Mansoor spends much of his free time posting anti-gay messages on a bulletin board for “Concerned Costa Mesa Citizens.” Those include numerous articles from right-wing groups like the Family Research Council claiming, among other things, that “homosexual men commit acts of sexual child molestation at a disproportionate rate.”

“The articles speak for themselves,” he said when asked to explain whether he thought there was a link between homosexuality and pedophilia. “The article doesn't say that all homosexuals are pedophiles. It's a study. That's what they came up with. I take it at face value. I don't think we should exclude documentation when we have it.”

The biggest contributor to the bulletin board for Concerned Costa Mesa Citizens is a political ally of Mansoor, a Costa Mesa resident named Martin Millard, who goes by the pen name H. Millard. In the past, Millard—who has joined Mansoor in calling on the City Council to eliminate funding for the job center and soup kitchen—has been a columnist for Citizen's Informer, the journal of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a racist, anti-Semitic group that opposes racial mixing (see Wyn Hilty's Machine Age column “Local H,” Dec. 25, 1998). In that publication, Millard expounded on his fear of the creation of a “tan man,” writing that immigration and racial intermarriage will ultimately produce “just a slimy brown mass of glop. The genocide against white people hasn't come with marching armies; instead it has come with propaganda that is calculated to brainwash whites into happily and willingly jumping into the Neo-Melting Pot, and to their destruction.”

“I don't agree with everything Martin says, and I haven't read everything he writes,” Mansoor said. “But the issues he speaks about at City Council meetings have been Costa Mesa issues. . . . I will not exclude anybody. If he wants the streets cleaned up, then I agree with him on that.”