Douse Those Fireworks, Costa Mesa : * Nonprofit Groups Elsewhere Raise Money Without Putting Danger in Small Hands

On Monday, the Costa Mesa City Council will have the opportunity to be a good neighbor as well as a responsible and responsive governing body. It will consider an ordinance that would prohibit fireworks in the city.

To date, the council has been backing away from taking action, but it should seize this important chance.

Rather than enacting the ban last year--after many residents complained about the use of fireworks of all kinds on July 4--the council threw the issue to voters, placing it on November’s city election ballot as an advisory measure. Residents, despite confusing ballot wording, voted against the city “continuing” to allow the sale of legal fireworks.

Although the council is not legally bound by that ballot, it should now feel a moral obligation to take the needed and wise step of prohibiting the sale and use of fireworks.

In response to similar complaints, most other Orange County communities have prohibited all fireworks, reacting to the obvious dangers of even state-approved, so-called “safe and sane” fireworks. What is allowed in those communities, and is widely available on July 4, are public fireworks shows staged by professionals.

By 1985, just five county cities had outlawed all fireworks; today just a handful of communities allow them. The holdouts, who keep ignoring the injuries and fire losses that prompted so many local officials to act, are Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, Garden Grove and Buena Park. Costa Mesa should hold out no longer.

Prohibiting fireworks is not a patriotic issue. Our nation’s birthday is still observed, but fireworks are present in public displays, where they don’t burn down buildings and inflict painful and crippling injuries.

And barring fireworks is not a life-and-death financial issue for nonprofit organizations that sell fireworks to raise money. In the communities that have prohibited their sale, such organizations have found other ways to raise money instead of putting matches and fireworks in children’s hands.

The real issue is public safety. Cities that have bans suffer fewer injuries and fires from fireworks. That’s why fire, police, school and medical officials so strongly support the bans. That’s why so many cities have them. And that’s why Costa Mesa should enact a ban too.

Costa Mesa residents responded in November to their City Council’s ballot question with votes that, in effect, said: Prohibit the sale of all fireworks. It’s time for the City Council to finally respond.