Parks: O.C.’s Great Outdoors

From the urban oasis of Santa Ana’s Centennial Regional Park to the rustic feel of Trabuco Canyon’s O’Neill Regional Park, Orange County has been fortunate in acquiring and maintaining acres of greenery that provide respites from everyday life.

Cities have baseball and soccer fields, playgrounds or vest-pocket parks. But it is outside the boundaries of cities and on county territory that we find greenery that is impressive for its sheer size: nearly two dozen parks, nearly 40,000 acres, including undeveloped open space. That expanse makes the county government Orange County’s fourth-largest landowner, trailing the federal government, which has Cleveland National Forest, and developers Irvine Co. and Rancho Mission Viejo.

Running those recreation areas takes money. Times have been tough for the parks since the county’s bankruptcy more than five years ago. But in the past two years, private donations to the county’s Harbors, Beaches and Parks department have tripled, adding up to nearly $2 million a year, a development worth cheering.

Some of the gifts come in large amounts.

Peter and Mary Muth have given $1 million for an interpretive center in Upper Newport Bay. James and Rosemary Nix are donating $500,000 for a nature center at Laguna Coast Wilderness Park.

Those welcome additions will give visitors a better understanding of the natural areas around them. But it also will cost money to operate the centers, as it does now to trim trees, repair paths and fix bathrooms in other parks.

Many of the county’s parks date to the 1970s and are showing their age. O’Neill and Irvine regional parks are older than the average--Irvine dates to 1897, the county’s first park--and need new sewer systems, at a cost of perhaps $1 million each.

Even before the bankruptcy, the county’s Harbors, Beaches and Parks division was struggling. A state raid on county treasuries in the early 1990s as the recession took hold wound up costing the county’s parks more than $4 million a year. After the fiscal disaster, another $4 million was shifted to other operations. The parks budget is now back to around $36 million a year, with about 5% coming from private donations.

Some parks and causes have special appeal. The Laguna Canyon Foundation has raised $2.3 million in 10 years for improvements to Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, the beneficiary of the Nixes’ generosity. Right now the park is open only on a limited basis and has no permanent restrooms or drinking fountains. The Orange County Zoological Society has raised funds for the zoo in Irvine Regional Park.

The challenge for the county is to ensure that money is spent on the upkeep of parks in less wealthy areas, where residents often are more crowded and have greater need of public recreational facilities.

Parks are an essential part of Orange County’s quality of life. That is seen clearly when the county requires developers to set aside open space in return for winning approval of new housing. The county has become more developed in recent decades, growing to today’s 2.8 million population en route to a projected 3.28 million in 2020. With more people, more houses, fewer orange groves and open spaces where it’s possible to hike for hours without seeing anyone else, the need to preserve wilderness and lakes and maintain fully developed parks becomes more urgent.

County officials juggle competing demands, from health care to building jails to implementing welfare reform. But they cannot forget parks.

The near single-minded devotion of county supervisors to paying off debt incurred in recovering from bankruptcy needs to be tempered by a broader view of what makes Orange County so attractive.

When the economy turns down again, private donations to parks might fall off. It’s up to the county to ensure that if that happens, parks are not again treated as a stepchild, saddled with higher user fees and less maintenance.