in reply to Running Web Apps as another user

You can use sudo for this task. You're going to configure sudoers file in such a way that your cm user which runs webapps gets a permission to run a specific command (rm /your/stray/files) as another user, their owner probably. Something like this:
cm webhost = (user) rm /your/stray/files
...and then executing sudo -u user rm /your/stray/files from your script.