Costa Mesa Sees Dream of a Marina Slip By

Costa Mesa has the arts,

And mall in several parts,

We’ve even got a fairground and arena.

We’ve got restaurants big and small,

Some say we have got it all.

You can even get some food from Argentina.

The framed poem hangs on Donn Hall’s bathroom wall, an anonymous missive he received two decades ago when he suggested his fair city defy geography.

The idea, the most ambitious development plan in Costa Mesa history, had been floating around for decades, but the councilman and one-time mayor was determined to see it realized during his watch.

We’ve got offices and lodging,

But there’s one thing we’ve been dodging,

Though it’s often been suggested by a dreamer.

He thinks our town is boring,

Since we have no local mooring.

Donn Hall wishes we could have our own marina.

The proposed Costa Mesa Marina, a two-mile waterway to the Pacific, was to be built in the southwestern edge of the landlocked city, along the east bank of the Santa Ana River and extending through unincorporated land and Newport Beach.

Costa Mesa seriously entertained the mammoth project in the early 1980s, spending about $200,000 to persuade the federal government to do a feasibility report -- the first step in getting the marina approved and built. Hall himself made two trips to Congress to make the case for the harbor.

“They were receptive,” says Hall, who still lives in Costa Mesa. “But money was an issue.” It seemed federal lawmakers weren’t convinced that boat slips in Costa Mesa were a priority.

Closer to home, Newport Beach officials, who would have had to approve the marina extension through their city, weren’t exactly enthusiastic, but at least they didn’t reject it out of hand. According to reports in the Daily Pilot newspaper at the time, the Newport Beach City Council wrestled with the wording for its position. “Not opposed” didn’t seem friendly enough, yet “endorsing” was too strong a word, the council felt. One member suggested saying nothing, but they finally settled on “support.”

For Costa Mesa, the marina was an issue of civic pride, the lofty aspirations of a city with humble roots.

Costa Mesa incorporated in 1953 when bean and barley fields dominated the landscape, and when the town’s nickname, “Goat Hill,” was still fresh in people’s minds.

The most significant local institutions were the blacksmith shop, the feed store and the pharmacy, according to local historian Hank Panian. But it wasn’t long before the farms and goats gave way to subdivisions and shopping malls.

Still, Costa Mesa lacked the glamour of neighboring Newport Beach, with its oceanfront homes and a bay filled with sloops and yachts. “There was a feeling,” Panian says, “that Costa Mesa deserved a marina.”

In 1962, a developer proposed the Keys Marina and drafted plans for 1,000 homes along man-made channels that would connect with the Santa Ana River and the ocean. A newspaper rendering of the project at the time depicts gulls hovering over smiling boaters. Financial woes sank the project.

Then in 1978, Hall joined the Costa Mesa City Council. The electronic engineer and businessman says he had heard of the marina and thought it could be a boon for the city and the region, but he didn’t give it serious consideration until he became mayor in 1982.

“I had so many studies I filled a Dumpster with that stuff when I left the city,” he says. “When people would say, ‘You can’t do this,’ I’d say ‘Here is the study that says we can.’ ”

The plan called for dredging the marina from just north of Victoria Street through where Talbert Regional Park stands today and Banning Ranch, a privately owned parcel.

The $200-million project would have provided as many as 3,000 slips for recreational boats and would eventually brought in homes, restaurants and shops, proponents said at the time. A city-paid consultant said the project could generate as much as $18 million in tax revenue the first 10 years.

Hall, who left the City Council in 1988 after serving a second term as mayor, agrees that the project has little chance of revival, because it would be met with fierce opposition.

“Everybody is pro-growth until it happens in their area,” says the plain-spoken 75-year-old.

He thinks we missed the boat,

When we changed our name from goat,

He thinks we should have let him have his way.

He wants to build a dock,

And then turn back the clock,

And rename our fair city Costa Bay.

The marina may be dead, but Costa Mesa’s love affair with the ocean -- so close and yet so far -- resurfaces now and then. In 2002, a group of residents lobbied unsuccessfully to have the city renamed Costa Mesa-by-the-Sea. Critics pointed out that there is no sea by the city; others said the name would be redundant, because the Spanish word costa means “coast.”

Hall says the marina was not a vanity project, but a serious attempt at economic progress. And in the end, it was economics that killed the plan.

He says that in 1985, months after Hall’s second trip to Washington, federal authorities agreed to move forward with the feasibility study if the city picked up part of the $250,000 tab. The council balked, and shortly afterward, Hall got the poem. He took it in good humor and framed it.