Mark 2026 down as the year the City of Costa Mesa goes into overdrive.

Before we try and digest everything that is going on, one editorial note: It is days like this that I start to worry about democracy. Not because, as some might say, authoritarianism is on the rise, and not, because others might say, our voting system is concerningly compromised.

Rather, as founding father and second President of the United States John Adams once said, “liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.” When even local government has issues as voluminous, complex and messy as these, I don’t really know how we’re supposed to ensure the people have this “general knowledge”. We’re going to have an election at the end of the year. If we can’t get our arms around what the city is doing, how are we supposed to discern who should lead it?

I’ll let you chew on that, because I don’t have an answer.

Ok, Throat-clearing, depressive outburst out of the way. Let’s buckle down. We’ve got a City Council meeting later today crammed with big discussion items, an Arts Commission meeting featuring a new ordinance to charge development fees to fund public art, and a Planning Commission meeting on the horizon that will *gulp* rezone huge chunks of the city.

City Council: Small-lot ordinance moves forward; self-checkout rules get a second reading; CAAP gets an update; Lions Park Cafe will be operated by beloved local business Neat Coffee; and the elusive Code of Ethics returns

The City Council Agenda this week is jammed packed full of substantive items, so I’ll touch on each of them as briefly as I can.

The updates to the small-lot ordinance and the new self-checkout regulations will each get their second readings. I wrote about each of these ordinances last time. Based on the discussions last week, I expect the small-lot ordinance will pass, though it may draw dissenting votes from the more conservative City Council Members Jeff Pettis (District 6) and Mike Buley (District 1).

The self-checkout ordinance, on the other hand, might be more contentious. Not only did it narrowly pass 3-2 at the last meeting — both Council Members Buley and Arlis Reynolds (District 5) were absent, and Mayor John Stephens broke with his liberal colleagues to vote no — it also got a lot more onerous along the way, as the majority stripped out exemptions that would have allowed Northgate Market and some others to continue to operate their self-checkout lanes without hiring significantly more staff. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the grocers and drug store owners that opposed the ordinance a few weeks ago to make a last-ditch effort to derail it tonight.

The outreach and data gathering process for the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP) will get reviewed tonight. Keep an eye out for discussions of the following table, which will give us a hint of where the CAAP will eventually go. Why does this matter? Because the policies outlined in the CAAP will provide direction for pursuing external grants from the State and Federal governments, which in turn will help shape future capital spending in this area:

The publicly-funded cafe that will open in Lions Park has an operator – and it’s Neat Coffee! Some might recall that a public cafe was part of the original plan for the massive Lions Park renovation, but had to be put on hold until funding materialized. That came (mostly) in the form of a grant from Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley, who of course served on the City Council and as Mayor while the Lions Park project was underway.

However, rather than the city running the new cafe itself, it has decided to farm out that work to an experienced operator. Following a standard RFP process, city staff has selected Neat Coffee, a beloved local business with its flagship location in the Westside, to run the place. While the agenda report brags that 50% of the revenue received by the city will go to support the Donald Dungan Public Library adjacent to Lions Park, that’s probably not a big of a deal as it seems. The actual agreement states that the city will only receive 3% of the cafe’s gross revenues, so the amount raised for the library is likely to be pretty small.

And finally, the City Council will finally take a look at a draft Code of Ethics – but will they pass it? This item has the potential to rip some scabs open from the fight over the dismissal of former city manager Lori Ann Farrell Harrison last year. The City Council has not reviewed adopting a proposed Code of Ethics since last July. At that time, the discussion shined a light on the deep divides on the Council that led to Farrell Harrison’s ouster. Will time have healed those divisions? We will see.

Arts Commission: Will “pro-housing” Costa Mesa slap a new fee on development… for art?

The Arts Commission will meet this Thursday to discuss this proposed ordinance as well as a few other things, including a potential project centered on the United States’ 250th anniversary of the founding and the continuation of the Arts and Culture Master Plan.

But the so-called “Arts Ordinance” will be the major item. What is it? Simply put, it’s a proposal to slap a requirement on pretty much every project in the city — public or private — to install public art onsite or nearby with a value equal or greater to 1% of the project’s total value. The only projects that would be exempt are private developments valued less than $500,000, residential developments of three units or less, and certain public works projects such as street rehabs, underground work, etc. Alternatively, project owners can comply by paying a fee equal to 1% of the project’s total value in a new “Public Art Fund” to be administered by the city’s Parks and Community Services Department.

On the one hand, I am very excited that a proposal that was generated by the Arts Commission is being seriously considered and proposed in good faith by city staff. That’s a big change from this time last year, when both the Arts Commission and the Parks and Community Services Commission were chaffing under policies that restricted their agenda control.

On the other hand… I’m not sure this arts ordinance is such a good idea. It would be one thing if the city were re-evaluating their existing development fees and looking to redirect some of those revenues towards the arts. But adding a new fee on top of the fees the city already charges seems like a much more questionable proposition given the city’s overall goal to make housing more affordable, rather than less. Additionally, not only is Costa Mesa still in the crosshairs of the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) for dragging its feet on housing production, the Supreme Court recently decided a case that throws the long-term legal status of such fees into doubt.

As a parting shot, I’d note that this art ordinance would be layered in among the other tax hikes the city is considering levying on businesses and hotels. Is there appetite for that? We’ll see.

And, last but certainly not least: the Planning Commission quietly rezones the city

Finally, we have a doozy of a public notice that the Planning Commission will meet next Monday to discuss… Whatever the hell this is. Ostensibly it’s the proposed draft updates to the city’s zoning code to enact the first baking of the twice-baked-potato approach to meeting our Housing Element rezoning requirements.

But honestly, I have a very hard time making heads or tails of these changes, which has gotten almost no attention outside this little blog. On a quick read I can tell that there is a lot of work being done to define the so-called “Multi-Use Overlay District”, or MUOD, and the requirements there appear to be driven almost entirely by state-law compliance considerations. However, one thing did jump out to me, as this change appears to apply to all residential zones, not just the MUOD zones (pardon the city’s watermark):

I could be mistaken but it sure looks like the city has done away with “tenant open parking” requirements, and by implication, reduced the total required parking by 0.75 parking spaces for 2-bedroom units and by 1.75 parking spaces for 3+-bedroom units.

Parking requirements for residential developments deserve their own post. But for now, it’s worth noting that it is sliding past the City Council — and certainly the general public — that “rezoning in accordance with the Housing Element” is going to touch far more than just the Housing Element sites themselves. Expect another good, long conversation at the Planning Commission about this, as well as the voluminous other changes the MUOD and this first round of zoning will likely make.