Back To School : COUNTYWIDE : NEWPORT BEACH : Residents Unhappy About School Buses

When Judy Spindle bought her Corona del Mar home earlier this year, she said she had no idea that dozens of buses packed with hundreds of children bound for field trips to nearby tide pools would invade her quaint beachfront neighborhood nearly every day.

With the start of the school year, Spindle and her neighbors are calling for better regulation of the trips so that buses full of children don’t end up parked along her curb, as occurred last spring when tide-pool season was at its peak.

“I’ve been close to tears with the situation,” Spindle said. “We don’t want to stop the children from seeing the tide pools, but we are concerned about their safety.”

Spindle and other residents on the corner of Ocean Boulevard and Poppy Avenue have chronicled the onslaught of youngsters with snapshots showing rows of big yellow buses with hundreds of children filing onto the street.

The right-angle corner is a red zone, but buses often illegally drop the children there because there is direct access from the corner to the beach and tide pools. Otherwise, the children would have to walk about half a mile from a beach parking lot.

But residents say the narrow residential street wasn’t designed to handle the crowds. They are fearful that the large groups of children lining the sidewalks and street are a prelude to an accident.

Additionally, the sidewalk overlooks a cliff that drops to the ocean, and there is no fence there to prevent the children from falling.

“This first time I saw this, I thought, ‘This is amazing,’ ” said Spindle. “I go out there and pull these kids off the cliff.”

Neighbors have also complained of engine roar and exhaust fumes from the buses, and of noise made by the children.

“The noise is a definite problem,” said Mike Francik, a three-year resident of the area. “They start singing and yelling and playing in the street.”

Other residents say that the problem has existed for nearly 20 years but that the number of visitors has grown in recent years. Only in the last few months has the neighborhood organized to seek solutions.

Most neighbors agree that pushing the problem out of their neighborhood will simply shift it a few streets away and have asked officials to institute stricter enforcement of parking rules and force buses to park in the city lots.

The city Marine Department has reduced the number of visitors allowed at the tide pools from 600 to 300 a day but adds that there is no way to prevent visitors on the public beach.

“The problem is, the Marine Department can tell a school the beach is full that day, but there’s nothing stopping the school from coming down anyway,” said Jim Brahler, an assistant traffic engineer for the city. “It’s a public beach, and you can’t really keep people out.”

Brahler added that with the start of the school year, the city’s traffic police will try to better enforce parking in the neighborhood, ticketing buses illegally parked or stopped in the red zone.

Spindle said she is confident that the city’s efforts will reduce student visitors to the area.

“We don’t mind the children, it’s just (when they come) en masse,” she said.