Hey team. As we head into Halloween (either a blip or Super-Bowl-level event for you, depending on your demographic and the number of young kids in your house), we find ourselves in a bit of a mid-Fall lull.

This week we have only two city meetings: a regular one for the Planning Commission and a special one for the Parks and Community Services Commission. The Planning Commission will focus almost all of their time on a someone bespoke issue with a local dog boarding service (the Bone Adventure). Sorry, dog enthusiasts: you’ll have to read the agenda for that one yourself.

Meanwhile, the PACS Commission will chew on the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update. I’ve already spilled plenty of digital ink on that issue here, but… there is a bit of hair on the presentation of the item to the PACS Commission.

First, I would note a bit of ball-hiding from Staff: I noticed that the PACS Commission agenda item neglected to append this very relevant letter from the California Department of Fish & Wildlife (CDFW) that the city received just this past September. As I noted in my piece on Fairview Park, on its face, the letter is pretty devastating to the Harbor Soaring Society’s bid to stay in Fairview Park. But it is also very, very critical of City Staff, and, by implication, Fairview Park Coordinator Kelly Dalton. The Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update is littered with references to “Resource Agency recommendations”. Isn’t it relevant to the PACS Commission what those recommendations actually are, and the extent to which they address matters outside of the flying field?

Second, what is up with the Staff’s second recommendation here?

I have so many issues with this.

First, why would the PACS Commission’s recommendations be “based on the Fairview Park Steering Committee’s recommendations”? These are separate bodies with very different mandates. Whereas the FPSC is focused solely on Fairview Park and its specific issues, the PACS Commission is tasked with managing the city’s park resources as a whole. We just got the pretty darned bad news that not only will the Fairview Developmental Center specific plan likely lack significant green space, the City Council doesn’t seem all that keen on repurposing any of the Mesa Linda Golf Course for that purpose, either (more on that in a later post, hopefully).

So no help is coming for the Westside to fix its active park space problems. That’s something that the PACS Commission should at least consider, right?

Also, if the PACS Commission’s recommendations should be based on anything, it should at least take into account the views expressed by the actual City Council members at the Study Session previewing the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update earlier this year. And yet the Staff report barely mentions this meeting and provides no links to either the meeting’s recording or the minutes.

Hey, PACS Commissioners that might be reading: check out the City Council’s study session video here, and the minutes can be found here. Probably worth noting there were over 48 public comments at this meeting, in addition to many pages of written public comments that were submitted as well. The City Council’s questions last for more than an hour.

Second, the Fairview Park Steering Committee’s recommendations were formed and adopted before the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update was published. Long before, in fact: the last time they were touched was in April of this year, when the FPSC (somewhat churlishly) refused to update its recommendations to conform to the City Council’s pretty clear instruction that a compromise be found to allow HSS to remain in Fairview Park. These recommendations also pre-date the letter from CDFW.

And perhaps even more interesting, the FPSC itself was not invited to update its recommendations in light of the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update being published when it last met earlier this month. Although the FPSC members had lots of suggestions, the Staff failed to agendize communicating those recommendations to City Council, which resulted in the Staff barring the FPSC from making any formal comments on the Draft. Cynthia McDonald of Costa Mesa First well covered this meeting over on her blog, and it’s worth flipping through it to get the whole picture here.

In my humble opinion, the PACS Commission should politely decline Mr. Dalton’s somewhat brazen attempt to launder the FPSC’s recommendations through a bigger, badder public body, and instead start from scratch with its own recommendations. The City is trusting the PACS Commission to take the entire city’s interest into account, not just the interests of the conservationists or the hobbyists. And doing that well would be a big undertaking.

The trick is, of course, that the Staff has left the PACS Commission very little time to do this before the City Council will review the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update in mid-November. The suspicious part of my mind wonders if this is by design; recall that, before getting called out by PACS Commission Chair Kelly Brown and Vice Chair Shayanne Wright, the Parks and Community Services Department had planned to skip the PACS Commission’s review of the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update altogether. One might get the impression that the Staff isn’t all that interested in the PACS Commission’s unique insights.

So perhaps it will just have to be a very long night on Thursday.