Council approves skate park despite opposition

Alex Coolman

COSTA MESA -- The City Council on Monday approved controversial plans

for a skateboard park, drawing a chorus of boos from residents in the

audience and smiles from skateboarders who have been waiting for a park

for more than a decade.

The park, to be built on what is now a fenced-off dirt field at the

corner of Hamilton and Charle streets, will be at a location decided on

after years of protracted wrangling.

And if the widely divergent opinions expressed at Monday night’s

meeting are any indication, perfect concord on the site has yet to be

achieved.

A number of residents spoke up to express their dismay about the

problems they feel are built in to the Hamilton Street location. Among

their concerns are a lack of parking, the danger posed by passing cars

and their own safety.

“I’m completely against it,” Charle Street resident Kristine Ivory

said Tuesday. “We already have a parking problem on Charle. What’s going

to happen when they put the park up?”

Ivory, whose bedroom window faces Charle, said she also is worried

about noise from the project.

And early this month, several residents -- including neighbors Vanessa

Cocroft and Hector Jimenez -- began a campaign to halt plans for the

park.

But skateboarders and city officials expressed satisfaction that the

park, so long in incubation, looks like it actually will be born.

“Everybody I know is for it,” said Keith Furrow, manager of the Costa

Mesa skateboard shop Network Board Supply. “We’ve needed one for quite a

few years.”

The Hamilton and Charle streets location was settled on after an

earlier site at Lions Park was scuttled in response to community

concerns. The failure of that plan and the city’s push for the new site

contributed to former Parks Commissioner Mike Scheafer’s resignation in

August.

Before voting unanimously to approve the project, council members said

the objections raised to the location had been heard before at other

proposed sites.

“I view this as a location that will work,” said Councilman Joe

Erickson.

Councilwoman Heather Somers said she believed the park would be an

asset added to the community.

If the words were supposed to be reassuring, they didn’t seem to have

that effect on residents. Ivory said she came away from the meeting with

the sense that the public expression of concerns about the site had made

no difference to the council members.

“It seemed to me that the City Council had made up their mind to go

through with their plan, regardless of what the citizens said,” she said.

And the vocal Doug Scribner, vice chairman of the Orange County

Libertarian Party, said he was shaking his head at the city’s enthusiasm

to build a park with no parking lot when a private company would not be

allowed to do so.

“When the city wants to build something,” Scribner said, “their own

rules go out the window.”