Although 2024 is shaping up to be a political bloodbath at the federal level, I’m actually hopeful that local matters will continue to make progress. Local issues like housing, roads, taxes and municipal services don’t map so neatly onto the partisan battle lines (unless we make them). With a strong City Council, a packed agenda and opportunities everywhere to make real, tangible improvements, I don’t see any reason for pessimism as far as the City is concerned.

So here are my top ten New Year’s Resolutions for Costa Mesa in 2024, in no particular order:

1. Pass a pro-housing inclusionary housing ordinance (IHO) or, better yet, reject the concept altogether.
   
   Study after study after study has come out showing that IHOs, however structured, are simply a tax on housing development and lower the rate of housing production. Period. There is also very, very poor evidence to show that the amount of affordable housing produced, which will be doled out by lottery, either improves the overall supply of housing or improves citywide affordability. It is, without question, a targeted welfare program with very few recipients, indirectly funded out of the wallets of every renter and homeowner in the city through higher overall housing prices and rents.
   
   So what to do? Either: (1) pass the most aggressively pro-housing version of an IHO possible (a very high minimum project size (40 units at least, to match the Measure Y thresholds), a very low inclusionary housing requirement (10% low or 5% very low, at the very most), and offering very conservative in-lieu fees, or (2) scrap it. Planning Commissioner Jon Zich was absolutely right: if the Planning Commission can’t figured out how an IHO works, who it should help, or what it should look like, why should a half-baked ordinance be passed by the City Council, who is equally flummoxed and conflicted? To pass something just to pass something is the absolute worst way to make public policy. So let’s just ditch it. Or at least shelve it until we figure out what the heck we want to do with it. I’m pretty sure we can talk down the HCD.
   
   
2. Figure a real game plan for Fairview Development Center, and form a planning advisory committee.
   
   It’s pretty clear at this point that the City is allowing its consultant, PlaceWorks, to run the planning process on autopilot while negotiations continue apace behind the scenes with the State. In addition to the ever-changing story about the proposed State Emergency Operations Center, which the City gave up fighting suspiciously easily, there is obviously a lot going on regarding the State Lands Act. What exactly is the City being given? What is the state of the land? How much abatement/reclamation/infrastructure work will need to be done to revert it even back to greenfield status?
   
   So before we let the residents get too starry-eyed about their hopes and dreams for a piece of land they barely understand, I think it would be better for some smaller group of individuals — with representatives from both ordinary residents and the City’s political stakeholders, like its City Council, the NMUSD School Board, OCTA, etc. — to be given a full accounting of what the City is being “given” and how much it will realistically cost to develop it. Then they can break the news to everyone else.
   
   
3. Crack the zoning code and commit to something bold: eliminating parking minimums or, even better, introduce parking maximums.
   
   I’ll have more to say about this in a future post, but imposing minimum parking requirements is a ridiculous exercise in central planning. Developers and property owners are perfectly aware that their buildings need parking access or they will suffer lower rents without it. These folks are also perfectly positioned to estimate how much of the development budget should therefore be devoted to parking to maximize their rents. Having the City second guess this judgment, and to spend months, even years, debating it, is just municipal malpractice.
   
   Now city after city is doing away with parking minimums. And for goodness sake, is Costa Mesa really less progressive than Raleigh, North Carolina, which ended its parking minimums this year, or Nashville, Tennessee, which went the extra mile and instituted parking maximums (capping the amount of parking that is allowed to be built in new developments, and permitting developers to build even less)? We can do this, and we should.
   
   
4. Ban new drive-thrus in core walkable areas.
   
   In another area, too, California cities are getting beaten to the reform punch by far more politically conservative jurisdictions: earlier this year Salt Lake City banned the development of new drive-thrus in its Sugar House neighborhood, with one city councilperson noting that “I think there are parts of our community where drive-thrus make sense, and, I think, Sugar House is not one of them anymore.” Couldn’t the same be said for a number of Costa Mesa commercial districts, including E. 17th Street, W. 19th Street, Newport Boulevard, Randolph Street, etc.? Drive-thrus make a mess of our curbs and cause all kinds of traffic problems if they are successful. Rooting for these businesses to be less successful than they ought to be so that urbanizing areas can continue to build walkable identities doesn’t make any sense for anyone. Let the existing businesses keep their drive-thrus and grandfather in adaptive reuse, but let’s stop building new ones where they just don’t work.
   
   
5. Fix our pathetic bus stops — forever.
   
   So, so many of our bus stops are just shameful for a City that prides itself on becoming more “multimodal”. Chipping paint, corroding trash cans, and dirty shelters are only the beginning of the problems. It’s painfully obvious that our street furniture is placed on the basis of ad revenue generation rather than usage, and that neither OCTA nor the City cares at all that seniors, children and the disabled are often asked to squeeze onto the margins of the sidewalk and wait with no shelter, no shade, and no seating of any kind. Our contract with ClearChannel Media, which maintains our bus shelters in exchange for ad placements, is set to expire this year, and I hope the City aggressively negotiates a better contract to expand our bus shelter amenities and to provide for better maintenance. And better yet, the City should swing for the fences and fund our amenities in perpetuity, by committing the funds received from ad revenue to improving our bus shelters and the walkability of the areas around those shelters. Don’t just fix it for today: fix it forever.
   
   
6. Break out our new red curb painting machine and start enforcing AB 413.
   
   If you haven’t heard already, California recently passed the AB 413 “daylighting” bill which prohibits parking within 20 feet of a marked crosswalk. Rather than letting Costa Mesans be caught unawares, I think the City should do them a solid by breaking out its new fancy red curb painting machine and painting red curbs everywhere AB 413 would apply. If they City’s worried about blowback, I think it should feel free to slap a flyer on a nearby pole explaining why it’s happening and the State law requirement.
   
   
7. Hire a competent Parks and Community Services Director with a strong development background.
   
   That may seem like a bit of a dig at our former Parks Director, Jason Minter, so let me assure you dear readers that it is. Mr. Minter, who — ahem — quietly departed City Hall last Summer, managed to rub a lot of people the wrong way. While I don’t mind a few sharp elbows, I did mind he was obviously not well suited to a role that now requires a lot of project development.
   
   And boy, do we have a lot of parks projects to develop. First and foremost there is the ongoing Fairview Park Master Plan, which is still trying to figure out what it can even do without triggering Measure AA. Then we have an exploding State grant for Ketchum-Libolt Park that appears to be making little progress. There are rehabilitations of both the Costa Mesa Tennis Center and the Costa Mesa Golf Course that got earmarked in the last budget surplus discussion. We have the Brentwood Park remodel that fed-up neighbors and residents elbowed into the queue of projects after waiting for decades. And beyond that, we have long overdue refreshes of parks and playgrounds throughout the City, many of which have not been touched for 30 years. Raja Sethuraman, our incredibly talented and hardworking Public Works Director, can’t do all of these projects by himself. We need a Parks Director with some vision and energy and I hope we find one.
   
   
8. Get OCTA to focus on comprehensive bus routes rather than shiny freeway projects.
   
   Ok this is more a wish than a resolution. But listening to OCTA, which is supposed to be a transit authority and not just a car lobby, crow constantly about both the 55 Freeway Expansion and the 405 Freeway “Improvement Project” (the one that added toll lanes) got so old in 2023. In 2024, I would give up everything else on this list just to get OCTA to knuckle down and focus on one, simple thing: providing high quality, comprehensive bus service in our emerging metro areas, including most of Costa Mesa. For God’s sakes, we don’t even have a dedicated Newport Boulevard bus line to to beach. TO THE BEACH. Get it together, OCTA. Or get out of the way.
   
   
9. Get a realistic picture of public safety in Costa Mesa, including crime and traffic violence.
   
   There is certainly a perception that Costa Mesa is “less safe” than Newport Beach or Irvine, and that crime — specifically property crime and petty theft — is on the rise. Additionally there is evidence that “traffic violence”, broadly defined to include all kinds of life-altering traffic collisions, such as pedestrian/bicyclist strikes, DUIs and car accidents, have also been increasing since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as good as the Costa Mesa Police Department can be, they have finite resources and they can’t be everywhere at once. So it would be great if 2024 was the year we started providing comprehensive public safety reports to the City Council. We already provide reports on enforcement operations in our city parks to the Parks and Community Services Commission. Broader reports covering the whole city, perhaps broken down by electoral district, would allow the City Council to appropriately prioritize their scarce resources and to level with the residents about what challenges the City is facing.
   
   
10. Start experimenting with new forms of public engagement, because the social media/community meeting combo just isn’t cutting it.
    
    Measure K. The Residential Permit Parking Program. The W. 19th Street/Placentia Avenue bicycle improvements. What do these all have in common? Angry public comments and thread after thread on social media filled with complaints that residents didn’t have a chance to weigh in on what was being considered before everything was finalized. Now, if you follow city business reasonably closely — yours truly reads every City Council agenda, plus the attachments when they are interesting, because I’m a nerd — you knew all about these programs and had plenty of chances to speak your mind. But when many, many residents that are directly affected by these programs have no idea what is going on until city workers start pouring concrete, something is obviously broken about our public engagement system.
    
    I would love to see the City experiment with different kinds of engagement, both traditional and cutting edge. First, hard copy communications might seem old fashioned, but they seem to work: Newport Beach apparently drops off or mails flyers to every impacted resident several weeks in advance of major decisions, and their residents are very happy with this approach. I’ve long advocated setting up explanatory posters when the City is taking action that could be misinterpreted, such as setting up temporary traffic calming or when the school district (with the City’s blessing) fenced off a huge part of Harper Park. And there might be some better ways to leverage technology, too: somehow political candidates manage to text us with obnoxious ad material; could the City at least push alerts to our phones about major decisions? How about push notifications through the City’s new app, Costa Mesa 311?
    
    Regardless, I just want to see them try something new. Because the email blast/Facebook post/Instagram post plus community meeting at odd hours combo isn’t working. It’s leaving residents feeling frustrated and left out. It’s 2024, people! We can do better!