Pact Eases Pressure to Develop Park

When the ink dried on a recent agreement between the city and Newport-Mesa Unified School District to share school athletic fields, Dick Mehren breathed a sigh of relief.

For Mehren and the other members of the Fairview Parks Citizens Advisory Committee, it was yet another victory in a decade-old quest to keep development away from the trap-door spiders and rare plants that fill the grassy expanses of Fairview Park.

Since the early 1980s, when the city purchased the 211-acre park from the county, the committee has fought dozens of requests to bring everything from a dance hall to an arboretum to the park, the biggest expanse of undeveloped public property in Costa Mesa.

This time, the request came in the form of soccer fields, volleyball courts and baseball diamonds.

According to a consultant’s study, children in Costa Mesa do not have enough places to play soccer or basketball. Fairview Park, the study suggested, could help take up the slack. Athletic facilities, including a 50-meter swimming pool, baseball fields, soccer fields, volleyball courts and a gymnasium, were recommended for 20 to 30 of the park’s acres.

However, when the agreement with the school district was signed, Fairview Park once again came out unscathed.

“This is a unique piece of property,” Mehren said. “It is a piece of property that is well loved by a whole lot of people. I am one of them.”

But while the agreement--which gives the city use of 24 school sites in return for helping with upkeep--eased the immediate pressure to develop Fairview, it doesn’t remove it completely, officials concede.

Because the final details of the school district plan have not been fully worked out, it is not known how much relief the city can offer overcrowded soccer, baseball and other sports programs. In the meantime, members of the Costa Mesa Youth Athletic Committee continue to push for fields at the park.

“We have always maintained that we don’t care where the facilities go, as long as they go somewhere,” said Mike Dunn of the Youth Athletic Committee, which represents AYSO and the local Little League. “The most obvious place is Fairview Park.”

Dunn, who has struggled for five years to find places to play for the more than 1,000 children who cram onto the handful of soccer and baseball fields, is afraid that the school district plan doesn’t go far enough. He fears that a single pen stroke could force them back to square one.

“The problem is (that the agreement) is not in perpetuity,” he said. “What happens if one of the schools is sold? My personal view is that I would like a good portion of Fairview Park devoted to children’s activities.”

Fairview Park, which lies between the Santa Ana River and Placentia Avenue, contains dirt trails, grasslands and steep bluffs. All told, it has about 11 developed acres. The city purchased the park after residents complained about a county plan to put a massive recreational facility there. Since then, the City Council, working on the advice of the Fairview Parks Citizens Advisory Committee, has guarded the park from development.

The commissioned study suggested that Fairview Park, combined with the school district’s facilities, could relieve Costa Mesa’s playing fields shortage.

But city officials didn’t agree.

Mayor Sandra L. Genis said the school district agreement alleviates current pressure to develop Fairview. “But I think we will need to do something else on the long term . . . whether it is re-examining Fairview Park or elsewhere,” she said.

In the meantime, Mehren and his group will continue to fight to keep the park undeveloped. “I feel better about it,” he said. “But you just never know where the next pressure is going to come from.”