Costa Mesa Leaves Rea Community Center in Limbo

The Rea Community Center is a place where battered women come for compassion, young people take part in athletic alternatives to gangs and victims of brain damage relearn how to care for themselves.

But the 11 independent nonprofit agencies clustered in the city-subsidized complex on Newport-Mesa Unified School District land are now in limbo.

The city has decided not to renew its lease, which expires July 17, because the center is expensive to run and needs federally mandated modifications to improve access for the disabled. What’s more, the city-funded center serves many nonresidents, officials said.

“The general sense of it is it might be time for the city to get out of that business,” said Mary Hornbuckle, who retired from the council Dec. 2 after 12 years. “We don’t want to totally abandon the agencies that are doing such a good job. With the loss of Rea, it might be time to ask them to work on their own.”

The school board is expected to make a decision about the property--a valuable commodity to a district needing space to alleviate overcrowded schools--after the new year. If the district does not make a deal with the tenants, they could be evicted when the lease expires. Still, officials expect some sort of a compromise that would allow the tenants to stay for an undetermined amount of time.

“We want to be extremely helpful to the agencies at Rea as long as it doesn’t conflict with our primary mission, which is teaching and learning for our students,” Newport-Mesa Supt. Mac Bernd said. “We haven’t made up our mind yet.”

There are reasons to shut down Rea as noble as keeping it open. A leading proposal would turn the complex back into a school to ease district overcrowding and reduce class sizes.

The result: Well-deserving charities could be sent packing to make room for well-deserving students.

Although the fate of the center remains unclear, volunteers and employees nonetheless are researching new locations to serve their clients, many of whom are in desperate situations and would not fare well if their care is interrupted.

Myke Jones, who works with mentally disabled adults at the Center’s Vantage Foundation, hopes his charity can stay in Costa Mesa, where he believes residents are generally compassionate toward charities and his clients.

“A lot of people here seem to be accepting of it,” Jones said. “Of course, you do run into a number of people who don’t accept what we’re doing.”

Janice Davidson is one of those people. She lives near the Rea facility and says it attracts loiterers, litter and illegal immigrants.

“The bums are back and the park is being used for laying around, and you can see bottles,” she said. “I am surrounded by a ghetto.”

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Rea’s troubles are well-known in the area. Someone Cares Soup Kitchen still keeps its administrative offices at the center but is forced to feed its clients at a church down the street to allay concerns about homeless people walking through the neighborhood. In 1990, the City Council forced the Share Our Selves food bank to move from Rea after residents complained of illegal activities in the area.

“It was designed as a school and a park,” said Jeff Evans, who recently moved from Costa Mesa to Portola Hills. “Placing that right in the middle of a residential community is something the people in the community don’t like and never have.”

The city first began paying the school district $110,000 a year to lease the property 14 years ago, a rate it still pays today. The total cost of operating the center--the lease, maintenance and staffing an on-site administrative office--is about $303,600, $114,000 of which tenants cover in rent.

The center opened in 1982 as a marriage of convenience: The city needed community space; the school district, strapped by Proposition 13, which restricted local governments’ collection of property taxes, needed income, City Manager Allan Roeder said.

A soup kitchen was the first tenant. Today, the agency houses an array of services, including Save Our Youth, an anti-gang program; Women Helping Women, for spousal abuse victims; High Hopes Neurological Recovery Group; and Harbor Area Adult Care Center.

Reopening the property as a school is not as simple as cleaning up classrooms, painting the walls and buying new chalkboards. The facility is out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and needs $300,000 in modifications to allow access for the disabled. That expense is one of the main reasons the city opted to pull out last year, Roeder said.

The property was allowed to operate out of compliance until inspectors from the federal Housing and Urban Development Department ordered the modifications after a review of public property citywide a year and a half ago. Even though the city was leasing the property, HUD wanted it to pay for the changes, Roeder said.

“We pointed out that we are the lessee not the owner, and HUD was pretty much unmoved,” Roeder said.

Many current tenants are expecting the center to close. After all, it is not normally a school district’s role to provide the social services Rea offers.

“I think it will be a real loss to the community,” said Jean Forbath, founder of the Share Our Selves food bank and free clinic, which moved from the Rea center to a Superior Avenue warehouse in 1990. “It [has] provided very good services, not only to the immediate community--Costa Mesa--but countywide.”