No time for hope at council meeting

I’d like to introduce Mayor Allan Mansoor and the Costa Mesa City Council to Vivek Mehta. He came visiting the council several weeks ago intending to do that himself but was denied the opportunity because the angry shouting match over Mansoor’s proposal to federalize the Costa Mesa police left no time or space for people seeking to speak on other matters. Mehta was one who was shut out. So let me tell you what you missed.

Mehta is completing his junior year in biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Irvine. A few weeks ago, he was the only California student named to the first team of the USA Today 2006 College Academic All-Stars. He is the son of immigrants who moved their family to Orange County from India when Vivek was 6 years old. He graduated from Orange Lutheran High School, where he captained the football team and led it to the CIF championship game two years in a row.

At UC Irvine, Mehta won the Nicholas Aeberhard Memorial Award as the most outstanding first-year undergraduate student. That same year, he began volunteering at the Share Our Selves free medical clinic in Costa Mesa and traveling to Mexico every five weeks with the Flying Samaritans, a group that runs a free, primary-care medical clinic about 50 miles south of the Tecate border crossing.

His achievements over the next two years would more than fill the rest of this column. His research on cellular and molecular immunology, for example, found that dioxin ? a pollutant used in Agent Orange in the Vietnam War ? can make people exposed to it more susceptible to infection, a discovery that won him two grants and appearances at three scientific conferences. By way of balance, in between such heavyweight projects, he trained for the Los Angeles Marathon.

A year ago, Vivek was awarded $10,000 by the Donald A. Strauss Scholarship Foundation to conduct monthly dietary health and nutrition seminars at Save Our Selves. The seminars were focused on the nutritional disorders of childhood that have almost quadrupled the number of obese and overweight children in the last 20 years and that continue to grow, especially among the Latino young. In his scholarship proposal, Mehta pointed out that obese children “are far more likely to develop ? diabetes, hypertension, social disorders, depression and cardiovascular disease.” A high point in his seminar project was an appearance at a health fair at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana where the means to counter obesity would be stressed.

He considered this an especially important matter for communities with high Latino populations, which was why he chose to appear at city council meetings in Santa Ana and Costa Mesa to offer a personal invitation to city officials to visit the fair.

At the Santa Ana meeting on March 20, he filled out a card expressing a desire to address the council and was warmly received and questioned about his work. After the meeting, the mayor and most of the council members continued the conversation. He knows that at least one council member visited the fair.

The following night was a dramatically different story. He appeared in the Costa Mesa council chambers early enough to find a seat but was told there was no point in turning in a card because the time for public comment was already filled. He chose to stay in the hope that extra time might be allowed for those shut out. It wasn’t.

Instead he was “shocked and amazed that a council meeting could be run this way, that we would talk about this one topic exclusively, even when most of the speakers were not from Costa Mesa, and one side totally dominated the public comments. Such hostility breeds a dangerous culture. The rhetoric was so supercharged that there was no moderate discussion of the actual subject.”

I had an opportunity to explore his feelings because I’m a trustee on the board of the Strauss Foundation and was lucky enough to sit beside Mehta at a meeting of 15 scholarship recipients last weekend. The Strauss scholarships have a unique twist. They are awarded on the basis of specific projects demonstrating a commitment to public service. At the end of the scholarship year, recipients gather at UCI to present a report on the results of their projects. Mehta was one of those reporting this year.

Singling him out should not be seen as a disservice to the other 14 winners. They also offered impressive accomplishments.

Daniel Zoughbie, for example, from UC Berkeley, created a corps of micro-clinics for the education, treatment and monitoring of diabetes among West Bank Palestinians who lack such facilities.

Alex Quick, from UC San Diego, came up with Donor Dudes, which promotes lifesaving organ, tissue, blood and marrow donations from students, a program that has already spread to five other campuses.

Loyola Marymount’s Aram Nadjarian reached out to juvenile hall youth with a program called Second Chance that offers positive options to these greatly-at-risk young people when they are released.

And Brian McInnis of UC Davis tackled a problem common to every college campus: the inability or inconvenience of students who haven’t re-registered to get home to vote ? given as an excuse for the low voting turnout of college students. To ensure long-term voter registration of university students, McInnis has come up with an online process that will be tested to allow Davis students to vote on campus in November. To guard against no bump in student turnout despite the new technology, McInnis will also head up a get-out-the-vote campaign.

So Mehta wasn’t a lone scholarship voice in his commitment to public service. But he was the only one to try to break through the rancor of the Costa Mesa City Council with a message of hope and goodwill.