Swap Meet Vendors Assail Plan to Shrink Selling Space

Dozens of regular vendors at the Orange County swap meet showed up at an Orange County Fair Board meeting Thursday in Costa Mesa to protest a decision to fence off part of the fairgrounds, an action that the vendors contend would threaten their livelihood.

The board voted in December to extend a fence at the fairgrounds, where the swap meet is held 50 weekends a year, to expand the facility’s carnival space into an area that now is used for parking. But it is in the parking lot that swap meet vendors do business, and extending the fence would do away with about 150 spaces occupied regularly by about 90 vendors.

“The loss of these businesses could be catastrophic for hundreds of families,” said Pam Jones, a vendor at the swap meet. Jones said that her family and her employees depend on the profits her pet food and supplies business generates at the swap meet.

Some of the vendors protesting Thursday wore armbands that read, “Don’t fence us out.” Others carried signs reading, “Who’s going to support my family?”

After the meeting, the vendors organized a committee to put pressure on the board and to look into legal action to prevent the fence extension from being built. Rick Denman, 32, said the vendors were late in organizing a protest campaign because they found out about the fence only last week.

The vendors said they had proposed that the board consider using a portable fence during the two-week county fair but that the board rejected that idea.

“The fair only uses (the fairgrounds) for 11 days out of the year,” vendor George Martin said. “The fence will displace (90) sellers and their families and employees who work here 50 weekends out of the year.”

Norb Bartosik, the fair’s general manager, said the board wants a permanent fence to expand the carnival lot and a thoroughfare to ease the traffic flow on the fairground’s Newport Boulevard entrance. “There’s no negotiating there,” he said.

The state, which owns the fairgrounds, leases the land to Tel Phil Enterprises Inc. in Newport Beach, which in turn rents spaces to the swap meet vendors.

Bartosik said that, in conjunction with its decision to extend the fence, the board offered to give Tel Phil the use of 300 parking spaces that the board has retained the right to use on swap meet weekends. But a spokesman for Tel Phil said those spaces already are being used by vendors.

“We’re not trying to displace people,” Bartosik said. “We know there’s enough room there for all (the vendors), and it’s up to Tel Phil to do the rearranging. It’s not our business to tell them how.”