**UPDATE** I’ve heard the City Council meeting today has been cancelled (and will be rescheduled) due to the rain.

The City Council and the Parks and Community Services (PACS) Commission are back in action this week and it doesn’t get more local government than this. Which is nice, actually. Our neighbors seem intent on wrestling with national issues, so it’s refreshing to have a local government that stays, well, local.

City Council

First up on the City Council, the consent calendar provides that staple of municipal government: road construction. The approval of the long-languishing Adams Avenue/Pinecreek Drive intersection improvements will finally come to City Council after bouncing around the Active Transportation Committee (ATC) for some time. This is going to be an awesome project. The plan will lop off the right-turn slip lane into Orange Coast College and add a ton of great pedestrian and bicycle improvements, including leading pedestrian intervals at the stoplight, green conflict paint and bike boxes, and new ramps. I expect members of the ATC to pull the item to give their kudos to the Public Works staff for their dogged pursuit of this project, as well they should.

If that sounds interesting to you, I’d also flag the letter from the Costa Mesa Alliance for Better Streets (CMABS) sent in via written public comments. It’s a nice change of pace from the endless cannabis complaints. It lays out CMABS’s goals for the City in 2024 and it’s got some ambitious policy bangers in there. Big ideas like eliminating parking minimums, adopting moratoriums on gas stations and drive-thrus, and making tangible infrastructure changes to the streets around our schools are all covered. I plan to speak to the letter as do other CMABS members.

Moving onto the public hearing items, we have yet another cannabis retail storefront appeal from a Planning Commission denial. Based on the public comments I’d expect many pitchforks if not for the rain. For months cannabis retail shops have dominated staff and Planning Commission time, crowding out other worthy projects as everyone wrestled with the complexities and unpopularity of cannabis regulation. Now, with the Planning Commission fed up and clearly just applying its own preferences to the proceedings, cannabis is set to waste and enormous amount of City Council time, too, as both councilmembers and applicants send up appeals. Lest it also waste our time, let’s move on.

On the new business front, we have the continued wind-down of the Costa Mesa Redevelopment Agency. While I’m sure this item has an interesting story (perhaps a post for another day), there isn’t much to see here with this item.

Then we have a request from Staff to receive and file a noise study conducted on the The 12 Gym in Eastside Costa Mesa. This was prompted by repeated, angry and insistent complaints from a resident that lives about 200 feet from the 12 Gym, who claims that the gym’s loud music and amplified fitness instruction is causing constant noise issues in her home. It’s a sticky problem. On the one hand, this resident must have understood when she moved in that loud commercial uses were likely (before the site was a gym, it was a lumberyard). On the other hand, the gym appears to be emitting somewhat constant sound just below our noise ordinance limits, which must be frustrating.

Then the capstone of the night is the initial screening of the proposed 60-unit, low-income senior housing development over the parking lot serving the Costa Mesa Senior Center. The project is being proposed by Jamboree Housing Corporation, a repeat player in the development of affordable housing projects in Orange County, and entails a long-term lease of the public land constituting the parking lot as well as retaining all of the existing parking spaces (albeit with 60 units of housing now sitting on top of it).

I can’t help but wonder if this project was aided, directly or indirectly, by the passage of Measure K. I think there were probably some ways to look at this project and consider it exempt from the public vote requirements of Measure Y, but there is also an argument that such requirement would apply here. Would this project have been brought forward to this point at all if Measure K hadn’t prevailed? I think that’s an open question. Clearly the City and Jamboree were in discussions about this project before Measure K passed (and the vision of housing on this site predates even those conversations, and apparently goes back all the way to when the Senior Center was first constructed). But when you look at the discussion over on the Costa Mesa First Facebook page, you can see why a developer might think twice about putting forward even feel-good projects like housing for low-income seniors. The house of cards of financing, contracts, and procurement the developer would have to assemble to get the project to the starting block could easily topple if concerns over parking or seniors crossing the street swayed enough voters in a low-turnout election. That’s a lot of risk.

Parks and Community Services Commission

Over at PACs, we have even more hyper-local issues. First off is an update on the parks-related capital improvement projects, which is a nice addition to the agenda. Interestingly I don’t see on the list the new parks projects that were added last fall by the City Council as part of the allocation of the city’s projected budget surplus, which include improvements to the Costa Mesa Tennis Center, the Costa Mesa Golf Course, and the completion of the cafe project at Lions Park. Hopefully Staff will cover those in its presentation.

Then we have the approval of a memorial bench for Fairview Park. I mean, that’s so gosh darn wholesome, who could be against that, right?

Well, believe it or not, Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns, potentially. I ran across his podcast last year on the topic of memorials in parks and it was a thought-provoking listen. When you see lovely memorials in our public spaces — the bronze statue of the elderly couple gracing a bench on Balboa Island is one of my personal favorites — it can strongly enhance a sense of place and history. But Chuck lays out some of the traps policymakers fall into when approached by these kinds of proposals. In particular, he warns against allowing benches to be placed without careful consideration of how — or really whether — the benches will be used. Additionally, memorial benches, and by extension, memorial trees, can become very difficult to move or reposition. Obviously people have strong sentimental attachments to these installations. So they may not be particularly happy if, even for very good reasons, grandma’s bench needs to be relocated or (God forbid) removed.

So here’s some food for thought for the PACS Commission: we’re about a year or two away from finishing up the Fairview Park Master Plan, and this bench may need to be adjusted to accommodate those plans. Being detail-oriented, even on little slam-dunk proposals like these, may end up paying dividends down the road when we try to go and implement that plan.

Finally, we have the customary Park Ranger and Director’s Reports. There is something funny about the Park Ranger report: the CMPD has stopped reporting the type of infractions that are being charged in our parks, and instead now only report the number of encounters and arrests. Compare, for example, the last park ranger report issued last year to the one that has been sent to the PACS Commission for this meeting. See the difference?

Sigh. I was just praising the level of detail reported in these updates. And this transparency really matters. For example, in the short term, what was the arrest in Harper Park for? There is also cryptic allusion to “concerns from parents about safety” at that park — were those concerns related to this arrest, or the simmering issues that are ongoing at that park? Without more information it’s hard to say.

But in the bigger scheme of things, these disclosures have served as the basis for meaningful public oversight. Analysis of exactly these reports led to concerns about disproportionate policing of our bicycle ordinances, which in turn ended up inspiring a state law to eliminate mandatory bicycle licensing statewide to curb these abuses. So I hope the Parks Commissioners notice this change and push back on it. We need more disclosure from the CMPD, not less of it.