Up for a game of midnight baseball?
What about a picnic in the park? How’s 4 am grab you?
Our parks in Costa Mesa are under ever more pressure for ever more activities by our growing population. People who prefer a quiet afternoon enjoying open space are at odds with those who prefer active sports. Those in organized leagues compete with others interested in pick-up games. Softball players compete with soccer players for space. And residents living adjacent to parks are tired of what seems like 24/7 activity.
We simply need more park land. As our population expands, we’ll need still more.
How has our city council responded? By blowing opportunity after opportunity.
Town Center--Blowing an Opportunity
In January 2007, the council approved a general plan amendment allowing 1,269 new, high- rise dwelling units in Town Center. The project’s environmental impact report (EIR) says this will bring 3,173 new residents to Costa Mesa. Based on the city standard of 4.26 acres of park land for each 1,000 residents (CM Municipal Code Sec. 13-255), the project will generate a need for 13.5 more acres of city park land.
Under State and local law, the City Council could have required the developers to dedicate 13.5 acres of land for parks.
They could have required land to be dedicated within the Town Center area, near where the new demand would be generated, an area where night time lighting and high activity levels in the late evening are the norm. This would have also provided open space relief amidst the concrete and glass.
Or, they could have accepted land elsewhere in the city already owned by the project applicants or purchased by the applicants for that purpose. This could have been a real win for residents, since one of the applicants owns the now-vacant Kona Lanes site at Harbor and Mesa Verde East. Lots of people have suggested it as a site for ball fields.
So, what did the Costa Mesa City Council do with this golden opportunity? They decided to accept “in-lieu” fees, fees that they know full well will be less than the cost of providing the much-needed parkland.
The fees would be used, they said, to “to improve the versatility of the existing parks in order to serve the community”. Huh??? Is that another way of saying “put in more lights”?
Well, okay, the sports capacity of some parks could be increased by reconfiguring fields, but that only goes so far. Besides, do we need every last square inch or our parks to be programmed?
Harbor & Fair--Blowing Another Opportunity
Remember the formerly vacant land at Fair Drive and Harbor Boulevard?
Starting in the 1990s, Costa Mesa officials had talked with the state on and off about acquiring the 5.5 acre parcel. At one point it looked like we might even get it deeded over without cost to the city, but state budget woes intervened. In August 2004, the City Council unanimously started a process to rezone the property from residential to “institutional and recreational” use--a prelude to acquisition for park purposes.
Around the same time the City of Newport Beach was trying to acquire land at the corner of Superior and West Coast Highway, land also zoned for residential use, which included some pretty great views.
As time went on, each potential transfer was on again, off again. In January 2005, the Costa Mesa City Council chose to drop further efforts toward local acquisition (voting 3-1, Dixon no, Foley absent), because in the words of Mayor Mansoor, attempting to justify his flip-flop, the land was “extremely [emphasis NOT added] expensive property, sigh, I don’t think we would have been able to go there,” implying the land would be unusually expensive.
An odd assertion. Can’t say I know anyone willing to pay a premium to live next to a highway. Maybe Mr. Mansoor does.
Later, at the height of the real estate boom, the property was sold to a developer for $11.1 million, or about $2,000,000 an acre. That is pretty expensive.
On the other hand, the State sometimes sells land for less than market price if some other public good will result, like more parks or housing for poor families. That’s what happened in Newport Beach. Usually they also require some type of deed restriction or profit sharing agreement, so local agencies don’t simply get cheap land from the State, then turn around and sell it at a profit
In late 2005, Newport Beach bought a 1.88 acre portion of what’s now Sunset Ridge Park for just $175,000. Last summer the Newport Beach City Council eliminated the residential designation for the 15.05 acre Caltrans West/Sunset Ridge parcel and redesignated it for park use, similar to the process commenced, but later abandoned, by the Costa Mesa City Council. The upper portion of the site was designated a public view point under Newport’s general plan.
So how much did Newport Beach pay the state? In late 2006, Newport Beach bought the remaining15.05 acre parcel to complete the park for $5 million, a little over three hundred thousand dollars an acre. Applying that land value, the Harbor and Fair site would have cost the City of Costa Mesa about $1.83 million.
The state also required that an open space deed restriction be placed over a portion of the Sunset Ridge land. No problem if you want a park. And the state financed the sale at 4.75 % interest.
Blowing Through the Cash
Isn’t Costa Mesa doing anything? Oh yes, as we know, they're putting in more lights at the old Mesa High farm site, increasing its "versatility". Hey, maybe they can double deck it. How’s that for "versatility"?
They also voted to buy a 1.19 acre site next to Brentwood Park on the east side for $3,542,000, or almost $3 million an acre. Of course that land on Harbor, at $2 million an acre was “extremely expensive. sigh…”. We just couldn’t “go there.”
And what else are they doing? Well, they budgeted $1,000,000 plus in state bond funds to redo fields at Tewinkle Park, $650,000 in general funds to renovate the Tewinkle Park lake, and $75,000 in park dedication funds to redo irrigation at Tewinkle. Wow! Tewinkle Park must be really versatile now.
Let’s focus on those in-lieu/park dedication funds: They budgeted $75,000 for a park study, $45,000 for signs at FOUR parks and another $25,000 for signs at four more parks. Bet those signs really increased versatility.
What else did they budget with the in-lieu money? $127,000 for two picnic shelters and $150,000 for a “shade structure” at the “Volcom Skate Park” and another $100,000 for parking lot lighting outside the skate park. (And what’s Volcom paying for anyway?) $60,000 to repair a slope at one park and $35,000 to re-landscape a slope at another.
And don’t forget $85,000 to lease land. For one year. Heaven forfend we should have anything permanent to show for our money at the end of a few years.
Some of this sounds like good stuff, but how’s it going to stretch park capacity to accommodate thousands more people? And as for some of the rest, I don’t know how one could blow through as much money as quickly if one were actually trying.
Consider:
Small parcel at Sunset Ridge purchased by Newport Beach:
$93,085 per acre
Large parcel at Sunset Ridge purchased by Newport Beach:
$332,226 per acre
Parcel at Harbor and Fair purchased by private developer:
$2,029,250 per acre
Brentwood park parcel purchased by Costa Mesa:
$2,976,471 per acre
City council truly dedicated to providing adequate recreation facilities:
We can’t go there.
