The agenda for the Costa Mesa City Council’s meeting today is out, and there is really only one item: the Fairview Park Master Plan Update.

So if Fairview Park isn’t your thing, tap out now. Because this post is long, and the meeting tonight promises to be even longer.

This time I thought it might make sense to pull directly from the Staff’s Agenda Report and highlight the questions it raises. I usually don’t do this because it makes for tedious reading (I’m sorry in advance). But this is such a curiously constructed report on such an important topic I think it merits extra scrutiny. To make it easier to navigate, here are the questions I think the Agenda Report raises, with links to the discussions below:

1. What is this meeting even about?
2. Where is the Costa Mesa Foundation in all of this?
3. What about the January 2025 City Council Study Session?
4. Does any of this trigger a Measure AA vote?
5. Why did the FPSC and PACS Commission get marginalized?
6. What can the City Council really do about all of this?

What is this meeting even about?

Right from the beginning we are presented a bit of a mystery. The title of the item says that the City Council will “discuss and approve” of “recommendations”, while the actual action items refer to the Council’s “review” of the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update and “providing direction” on the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update itself.

So, which is it? Is the City Council being asked to approve the recommendations, which presumably refer to this document attached to the Agenda Report, or provide direction on the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update, which was also attached?

Note that, while both objectives refer to the same general subject matter, they are not the same. The recommendations, on the one hand, are a long policy wish list that has been drafted first by the Fairview Park Steering Committee (FPSC) and then generally adopted (with some material edits) by the Parks and Community Services (PACS) Commission. The Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update, on the other hand, represents the Staff’s proposed implementation of those recommendations, some of which are quite controversial.

I only harp on this technical point because it’s tripped up prior meetings on this topic. For example, even though the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update was available for review at the last Fairview Park Steering Committee (FPSC) meeting, Staff only invited that body to reaffirm its prior recommendations rather than provide specific feedback on the draft itself — meaning that the FPSC couldn’t opine on the draft without violating the Brown Act. Later, the PACS Commission similarly was invited to provide its feedback on the draft only as a function of its agreement with the FPSC’s recommendations, rather than as stand-alone feedback.

So despite the item’s title and the attached FMSC/PACS recommendations, there is nothing for the City Council to formally “approve”. What can it do? We’ll circle back to that at the end.

Where is the Costa Mesa Foundation in all of this?

The next section goes over the cultural resources of Fairview Park, including the user groups that the Staff considers stakeholders due to the fact they hold “year-round programs or events” at the park:

What I find a bit odd about this is that the Costa Mesa Foundation is not listed as an “Organized Recreational or User Group”, even though I would think it certainly fits the bill. Concerts in the Park, which are held three times over the Summer, are the Foundation’s largest fundraisers and huge community events in their own right. Why wouldn’t the Costa Mesa Foundation be listed as a stakeholder? While the Staff deflected questions about Concerts in the Park raised by PACS Commissioners at the last PACS Commission meeting by saying such events were outside the scope of a master plan, I wouldn’t think the same analysis would apply to an agenda report like this one.

I have heard through the grapevine that these various user groups are going to be invited to give presentations on the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update at Tuesday’s meeting. Will the Costa Mesa Foundation be included? If not, why not? I feel like its testimony would be relevant.

What about the January 2025 City Council Study Session?

After the Agenda Report recounts the timeline of the master plan development process that brought us to this meeting, it briefly summarizes the feedback Staff received at the last City Council meeting where the plan was discussed, which was the special meeting back on January 28, 2025:

While it is certainly true the City Council “discussed… balancing of resource protection and public use” at that meeting, this terse summary doesn’t reflect the specific questions that council members asked Staff to revert on at the next time the plan was brought up. At the time, Staff has promised the City Council a second study session within a few weeks of the first where these questions would be addressed, but that meeting never happened. So this is the time to address those. The unanswered questions included:

• Council Member Loren Gameros:
  • What agreement does the city have with the Orange County Model Engineers (OCME), and can the Staff bring forward a similar long-term use agreement to cover HSS?
  • Can you show pictures of actual pooling water sitting in the vernal pools to give the Council a better sense of how HSS and OCME impact the vernal pools?
  • Can we figure out a way to have a flying field, OCME, and the vernal pools can co-exist?
• Council Member Arlis Reynolds:
  • What are the city’s standard practices in terms of fire mitigation in Fairview Park?
  • Can the Staff share the specific recommendations from the Tribal Advisory Group?
• Mayor John Stephens:
  • How can we reconcile shutting down the HSS because of its impact on the vernal pool complex, when the OCME track runs straight through another vernal pool?

None of those questions are answered in the Agenda Report. Interestingly, none of those questions were included in the Staff presentation to the PACS Commission, either. So hopefully there has been an update to the slide deck since then.

Does any of this trigger a Measure AA vote?

Measure AA came up repeatedly in the PACS Commission discussion as well. I’ve already discussed this point at length so I won’t belabor it again here, other than to note that the Agenda Report isn’t exactly forthcoming about how Measure AA may interact with the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update:

That is true… but doe the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update anticipate “major changes”, or not? There was a strange exchange on this point at the PACS Commission when PACS Commissioner Shayanne Wright pointedly asked this question:

To summarize, Fairview Park Administrator Kelly Dalton, a member of the Staff, answered by saying that any particular project contained in the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update that would require new construction would likely need a vote under Measure AA. Yet, while he is answering, you can see the City’s consultant, Travis Brooks of Land IQ, squirm in his seat. When he gets a chance to jump in, he contradicts Dalton directly:

Almost all of the recommendations are in line and refinements with additional knowledge of what has already been discussed in the previous master plan revisions and updates as well as the original. So from our view and everything we’ve learned talking to staff, we don’t expect anything in the master plan document to trigger AA, anything that’s done is actually giving a net gain to the habitat quality, to the recreational value without constructing new things that are above and beyond what is already on site. So I think anybody making an argument to the contrary would have to really prove that out because I don’t think that anybody’s who’s looked at it really feels like that the master plan would trigger AA.

Travis Brooks, City of Costa Mesa Parks and Community Services Commission Special Meeting, October 30, 2025

I’ve been thinking about this exchange a lot, and not just because it runs counter to my own analysis (though, in fairness, it runs counter to super-resident Cynthia McDonald’s thinking, too, and she knows Measure AA much better than I). Why was Brooks so eager to jump in and correct Dalton, who presumably is his boss? And why did they disagree on what the PACS Commission ultimately determined was a pivotal issue?

Moving along.

Why did the FPSC and PACS Commission get marginalized?

But here is where the “public engagement” section really falls apart from me. There are no specific comments on the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update itself from the FPSC or the PACS Commission in the Agenda Report.

With respect to FPSC, which is really a glaring omission, that is because the Staff remarkably did not ask. Go read Cynthia McDonald’s recap of that meeting linked above: Staff simply did not agendize a discussion of the draft itself, and thus the FPSC could not have one.

As for the PACS Commission — I’m at a loss, honestly. Did we watch the same meeting?

I don’t know which is the more insulting : the sentence reducing the passionate and specific public comments that were all on one topic — the fly field — to “advocating for various initiatives”, or the outrageous truncation of the PACS Commission’s lengthy and specific recommendations. Recall that the PACS Commission dutifully went point-by-point through each one of the FPSC’s recommendations, an effort hardly captured by one summation sentence.

But there are three glaring omissions that really irk me. First, the PACS Commission didn’t just ask that the plan adhere to the Active Transportation Plan — it requested that the draft be presented to the city’s Active Transportation Committee for review and comment, which the Staff indicated it would do. Yet this request for enhanced process was changed to a request for mere “language” to be added.

Second, the recommendation to “explore fly field options outside the park” was highly contentious and passed only on a 3-2 vote. One of the dissenting commissioners, Commissioner Wright, specifically asked that the closeness of vote be noted in the recommendation. Dalton nodded his head as if to agree to this request. And yet: there is no mention of that vote here!

And third, the PACS Commission asked a new recommendation be added to the ones provided by the FPSC, which was to add an entirely new recommendation (#26) to consider a ballot measure under Measure AA to fully implement the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update. This recommendation was included in the PACS Commission’s motion to approve its recommendations that were intended to be transmitted to the City Council.

And yet, this recommendation isn’t even mentioned in the Agenda Report, nor is it listed on the “recommendations” attachment.

It is worth noting at this point that the PACS Commission had to fight tooth-and-nail to even get a chance to review the Draft Fairview Park Master Plan Update. Despite being the penultimate authority in the city on all things parks, Staff didn’t include a stop at the PACS Commission until the PACS Commission Chair and Vice Chair wrote a pointed letter to the City Council asking to be included. And now, their recommendations have been summarized in a sentence that doesn’t even fully capture its specific instructions and recommendations. 😡

I think the Staff has a lot to answer for here in terms of managing the City Council’s commissions and committees. It seems pretty disrespectful to first, not invite FPSC to provide comments on the master plan itself, and second, to take the specific comments it did receive from the PACS Commission and radically over-simplify them.

On to the last point. I promise.

What can the City Council really do about all of this?

To follow up on the issues raised at the beginning of this post, I finally want to draw your attention to three little sections found at the back of the Agenda Report:

First, the “Alternatives” section is shockingly light. Just stating “the City Council may… pursue other alternatives” is not helpful — it’s a mere restatement of the Council’s authority. This section is supposed to give the City Council meaningful alternatives to the action proposed. Yet, as I noted above, the Agenda Report isn’t even clear on what action, if any, the City Council is being asked to take!

Second, I’ve already raised issues with the use of the Park Development Fees Fund (Fund 208) referenced in the “Fiscal Review” section (see my note at the bottom of this entry here). That fund is supposed to expand human park access, not limit it. What is $65,000 among friends?

But my real issue is with the third point, under “Legal Review”. “The direction will be advisory in nature” (emphasis added)? What?

If I were a member of the City Council, I would probably tear my hair out at this point. The City Council has advised — over, and over, and over — what it would like to see done with the fly field. And the Staff has come back at least three times with different alternatives that all ignore that “advice”. Now, with the Draft actually in their hands, and with the next opportunity for review being the final plan, Staff is still leaving itself room to relegate their requests to the dustbin of “advice”.

So to bring it full circle, the question I asked first is really the core problem with this item: what is it that Staff is asking the City Council to do? And if it is not clear, why isn’t it clear?

Parting Shots

Overall, I found this Agenda Report to be one of the more troubling ones I’ve read during my time as a City Hall watcher. I am reluctant to say this because I know that the Staff works very hard to produce these things and I’m sure they’re doing their best, but frankly this one obscures more than it illuminates.

Unfortunately, transparency has been a problem with this Fairview Park Master Plan Update process from the beginning. I attended the very first “visioning” meeting for this process way back in the Fall 2023, and I found it very underwhelming. Then, as now, the presenters used vague language to obscure or even ignore big, difficult problems: when Measure AA would and would not apply, the conflict between HSS and the vernal pool complex, the specific consequences that would or would not befall the city in terms regulatory enforcement, etc.

And now these problems have landed in the City Council’s lap with very little in terms of meaningful guidance.

Instead, this Agenda Report seems to have been crafted to give maximum flexibility to the Staff. The Agenda Report is silent on the specific questions raised by the City Council in the January 2025 study session. The ambiguity in the title’s item and its recommendations comes off as strategic. And there is no mention of specific alternatives or their costs; for example, the PACS Commission directly discussed the process and cost of procuring a take permit from the California Department Fish & Wildlife and/or the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife, yet that option wasn’t even mentioned.

I can’t help but wonder why this might be the case. Hopefully, we will learn more tonight.