On Thursday, the Parks and Community Services (PACS) Commission will meet for the first time in almost three months, a hiatus that comes on the heels of the Commission meeting only one time during the entire fourth quarter of 2024.

That sparce meeting schedule has been a problem. The PACS Commission, which is supposed to oversee parks-related capital improvement projects (CIP), was given a massive list of open projects by the public works staff last fall (I’ll refer to this list as the “Sept. 2024 Parks CIP Update”), many of which had deadlines or milestones that fell during the last few months of last year.

So you’d think they’d have a lot to talk about this week. But instead of coming back to a mountain of updates, reports and approvals, the PACS Commission has been served up yet another empty agenda.

What on Earth is going on?

The park CIP projects: late, later, and laughably late

Based on the Sept. 2024 Parks CIP Update linked above, the following projects should have hit some kind of milestone in the last five months:

• Ketchum-Libolt Park Expansion (Design: Fall 2024, Bidding/Contract: Winter 2024, Construction: Spring 2025)
• Shalimar Park Expansion (Design: Fall 2024, Bidding/Contract: Winter 2024, Construction: Spring 2025)
• Tewinkle Parks Lake Repairs (Bidding/Contract: Fall 2024, Construction: Spring 2025)
• Tewinkle Skate Park Expansion (Design: Fall 2024, Construction: Summer 2025)
• Fairview Park Mesa Restoration and Cultural Resource Preservation (Bidding/Contract: August/September 2024, Construction: Fall/Winter 2024)
• Fairview Park West Bluffs Stabilization and Restoration (Bidding/Contract: September 2024)
• Brentwood Park Improvements (Design: Late 2024, Construction: Summer 2025)

And now, here are all of the requests for proposals (RFPs or “bids”) that the City of Costa Mesa released since the date of Sept. 2024 Parks CIP Update (September 12, 2024) through the present:

If you squint you’ll notice that only one of the projects listed above was sent out for bids: the Tewinkle Park lake repair project, which went out to bid on 10/21/2024. Also, a project that looks an awful lot like the Fairview Park Mesa restoration and cultural resource preservation project went to bid on September 10, 2024, just before the Sept. 2024 Parks CIP Update was released.

That said, based on this information, I think we can infer that the projects listed above are in pretty bad shape in terms of timeline:

• Ketchum-Libolt Park Expansion: even though design wrapped up in 2024, this project failed to be bid out in Fall 2024-present. Bidding can take at least a month and the contract will require City Council approval.
  • Verdict: At least 2-3 months behind schedule.
• Shalimar Park Expansion: Similar to Ketchum-Libolt, design finished reasonably on time in 2024. However, the ongoing saga of whether or not the city may purchase the adjoining lot and use it to expand the park may be delaying sending out the actual RFP.
  • Verdict: At least 2-3 months behind schedule, probably more if it is being held up by the lot expansion.
• Tewinkle Parks Lake Repairs: Although this project was re-bid in October 2024 as noted above, I have to believe this bid has failed yet again. As with the prior bidding of his project, the City once again only received one bidder, who is still only offering to do the job for almost double the City’s estimate.
  • Verdict: assuming the bid is rejected again, at least 4-5 months behind schedule, and maybe more if the city has no present plan to secure additional bids.
• Tewinkle Skate Park Expansion: this one is a head-scratcher; the city seemed to have reasonable momentum when it held its first public out-reach meeting in May 2024, but the project has gone completely AWOL since. OC Supervisor Katrina Foley, whose grant is helping to fund the skate park expansion, made pointed comments about the project in her latest newsletter. Noting that the final community meeting is now scheduled for March 2025 — almost 10 months following the first meeting — Foley pithily remarked: “I directed the City of Costa Mesa to do everything in their power to break ground by Summer 2026.” Not exactly what you say when you are impressed by the city’s breakneck pace.
  • Verdict: at least 6 months behind schedule, probably more.
• Fairview Park Mesa Restoration and Cultural Resource Preservation: dig into the bid documents a little bit and you’ll see that the initial RFP was met with a flurry of questions from potential bidders. This pushed the target date for a contract to November/December 2024. Although proposals were due on October 8, 2024 and the bidding is marked as closed, as far as I know, no bidder has been selected and certainly no contract awarded. Is this another effectively failed RFP?
  • Verdict: at least 1-2 months behind schedule, possibly 3-6 months if the RFP has failed.
• Fairview Park West Bluffs Stabilization and Restoration: I didn’t see anything related to this project in the Fall in other meetings or on the bid site.
  • Verdict: No idea, but clearly the bid didn’t go out as planned in Fall 2024. Assuming it gets bid soon, it’s at least 4-5 months behind schedule.
• Brentwood Park Improvements: There hasn’t been a single public meeting on this project since it was elbowed into the top tier of parks CIP projects by a bunch of very determined neighbor moms back in the Summer of 2023. Not one! This one is hilariously behind schedule. Given that it will need to have at least a few public meetings and the city hasn’t even put out a bid for design work, I’d say this one is in trouble.
  • Verdict: at least 6 months behind schedule. Probably more.

Remember: the Public Works department already culled this list down to the most essential, most time-sensitive projects back in 2023 because it anticipated being limited by staff bandwidth in terms of execution. So I’m not exaggerating when I say that these delays are critically important in terms of getting these projects done at all.

Enter the PACS Commissioners: Time to brush up on the municipal code and get to work

I can imagine this parade of missed deadlines and failed bids may make the PACS Commissioners feel like they are in a bit of a bind. On the one hand, the Staff, including current PACS Director Brian Gruner, is failing to keep the public informed of these issues by issuing agenda after agenda devoid of meaningful items and updates. Really the PACS Commission is in the best position to hold Staff accountable, and it should.

On the other hand, pushing Staff to prepare yet more updates and reports takes away precious staff time from the projects themselves. You don’t want to undermine forward progress by making the Staff do busy work. So what to do?

Mercifully, Costa Mesa’s municipal code may contain the answer:

The code section above sets out the powers and duties of the PACS Commission, which, remarkably, more than rival the power and scope of the Planning Commission. I would particularly zoom in on subparagraphs (b) and (g). These subparagraphs give the PACS Commission independent power to set its own agenda, to conduct its own investigations, and to separately evaluate the capital improvement plan and to advise the City Council on the highest priority needs. This is incredible authority: not even the City Council has the ability to independently set the meeting agendas, as member-requested items still have to be vetted by the City Manager and the City Attorney.

So how should the PACS Commission use these powers, which it has never (to my knowledge) really exercised? Well the first thing I would do is to demand transparency. Resetting the Sept. 2024 Parks CIP Update to the present date should be a pretty easy task. But then, the PACS Commission should go further and formally present the state of our parks projects to City Council. It is painfully clear that the “current operational needs” of our parks projects far outstrip City Hall’s ability to execute. Given that this deficit has the potential to put grant funding in jeopardy, the City Council should know. They will face enormous political blowback if that were to occur. If Director Gruner and/or the City Manager will not update the City Council, the PACS Commission should do so on its own motion.

And lastly, it should press to revise the Open Space Master Plan (OSMP). The PACS Commission has broad authority to create its own action plan with respect to carrying out the OSMP, meaning that, once the dust settles on these large grant-funded projects, the PACS Commission itself could create a schedule of projects to prioritize in future capital improvement cycles. And while they could do that right now, they would be on even firmer ground if the OSMP reflected the City’s current open space assets and priorities.

Or they can go in another direction altogether. Honestly I’m indifferent so long as the the PACS Commission stops passively accepting empty agendas and starts actively flexing its muscles. Otherwise, like the resident committees, the PACS Commission may quickly fade into irrelevancy.