Costa Mesa brews up ‘Neat’ private-public collab for new café at Lions Park
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Visitors to Costa Mesa’s Lion Park will soon have a place to gather, sip coffee or just be, after officials Tuesday announced they’d found a local operator to run a newly built café set to open in the coming months.
Neat Coffee — which has been serving Costa Mesans from a Pomona Avenue storefront since 2015 — will run the 1,100-square-foot Café Mesa under a three-year service agreement that can be extended for an additional three-year term.
Buildout of the space was paid for by $1.2 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funding, provided through the office of Orange County Supervisor and former Costa Mesa Mayor Katrina Foley, and another $1.1 million from the city’s capital improvement fund.
Although the terms of the service agreement are still being negotiated, details of a revenue-sharing arrangement between the coffee company, the city of Costa Mesa and the county were shared during a regular council meeting Tuesday.
Neat Coffee will hand over 3% of its gross revenues to the city, which will give half of the total amount collected to the county’s OC Public Libraries for programming at Costa Mesa’s Donald Dungan and Mesa Verde libraries, according to a memo of understanding between the two entities.
The city’s half of the funds will be used for maintenance of the two library sites and Lions Park civic center — which comprises the Donald Dungan Library, Norma Hartzog Community Center and Downtown Recreation and Aquatics centers — a cost previously borne by the city.
In a proposal to the city, Neat Coffee owner Ally Garvin described her desire to serve the public at city-sponsored events, create new ways for people to gather and proposed charging below-market rates and offering discounts for seniors and library card holders.
“This is the kind of proposal we want to attract,” Councilmember Arlis Reynolds said Tuesday. “This could be the start of a new approach to public-private partnerships — I’m excited to see what they can do.”
A Vanguard University graduate, Garvin has lived in Costa Mesa for the past 20 years and, on Tuesday, recalled working at the recreation center and taking her young daughter to swim lessons and library storytimes.
“It feels like our backyard, and I’m really really excited to breathe a lot of life into that space. It kind of gives people permission to hang out there longer and have a drink and a snack,” she told the council.
Café Mesa is a concept that dates back at least a decade, when Costa Mesa city leaders were crafting a vision for renovating a somewhat run-down Lions Park area into a thriving community hub on the city’s west side.
But when the final plans came up for approval in 2017, funding for the café was not available and so officials settled on a building foundation and some architectural designs, so that the plan might one day be realized, Foley recalled Thursday.
“I really loved the idea of having someplace people could socialize and gather, and part of the whole Lions Park project was supposed to be very family centered,” the supervisor said Thursday, sharing her enthusiasm for Neat Coffee’s being picked to set up shop there.
“I was really excited to see it was a local, woman-owned business,” she added. “Part of the vision was we didn’t want just a concessionaire that would bring processed, pre-packaged food — we wanted a business with a little heart and soul, something the community would be proud to support.”
