Five apply for open City Council seat

Newport leaders are expected to on Tuesday choose a replacement for John Heffernan, who resigned in January.Newport Beach City Council members will decide Tuesday which of five people to appoint to the seat left vacant when John Heffernan resigned last month.

Tuesday was the deadline to apply for the Seventh District seat, which represents about 12,400 voters in the Port Streets, Spyglass, Newport Ridge, Harbor View and a few other neighborhoods.

The five applicants are financial advisor Keith Curry, community volunteer Nancy Jones, local activist Dolores Otting, architect Scott Peotter and employment-agency manager Daniel Wampole.

Council members will hold a special meeting Tuesday to interview the applicants and appoint one. If no candidate gets a majority vote, the council could put the empty seat on the June 6 ballot.

Several of the applicants have been involved with the city to some degree. Curry was just named chairman of a committee that will study financing city buildings, and Otting has run for council twice before, losing to Heffernan in 2004 by 3,125 votes. Wampole is a member of the Newport Coast Advisory Committee, which represents Newport Coast residents, and Jones has served on the board of the Newport Beach Public Library and is now on the heritage committee for the city’s centennial.

If council members agree on an appointee Tuesday, it will be the fourth appointment in three years. Councilman Steve Rosansky was tapped to fill an empty seat in 2003 and won election the following year; Councilwoman Leslie Daigle was appointed in September 2004; and Councilman Ed Selich was named to a council seat in June 2005. Daigle and Selich face voters for the first time this fall.

The spate of resignations from the council have been for personal or professional reasons, but they’ve led some critics to complain that appointments have become a way of doing business in the city.

The person appointed to Heffernan’s seat would have to run in November to hold the seat through 2008, when Heffernan’s term would have expired. That means six of the council’s seven seats will be on the fall ballot.

Heffernan, who resigned on Jan. 11, was elected to the council in 2000 and 2004, and he served as mayor in the second half of 2005. Though supporters said he was an individualist who spoke his mind, critics called him a waffler and a contrarian. He was often in the minority on split votes and he nearly resigned from the council in 2004 but later changed his mind.

When he finally did step down, he said he’d been neglecting family commitments to attend to the ever-growing mound of council business. He recommended Otting to replace him.

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