Costa Mesa, Calif: A Flash Point for City Belt-Tightening

Watching city government in action is usually a cure for insomnia. Not so the Apr.5 city council meeting in Costa Mesa, Calif., a wealthy coastal town about 40 miles south of Los Angeles. In a heated four-hour gathering, the overflow crowd broke into whooping applause after one resident called on the mayor to "fire yourself." Another invoked a Vietnam War sound bite when she said council members "had to destroy the village in order to save it."

The pulse-quickening meeting was the latest backlash against the city's plan to fire nearly half its municipal employees in an extreme budget-cutting measure. The main driver behind the proposal is Jim Righeimer, a Republican and longtime anti-union activist elected to the city council in November. On Mar.1 the 52-year-old real estate developer and his fellow council members voted 4-1 to send termination notices to 213 city workers, about 45percent of the total. A little over two weeks later a 29-year-old maintenance worker named Huy Pham jumped to his death from the roof of City Hall after being called in to receive his notice.