OCC swap meet may re-expand
Deirdre Newman
The swap meet at the college may be back in business all weekend
long if measures are taken to lessen its affect on the surrounding
area.
That’s the city planners’ recommendation, which the Planning
Commission will consider Monday. Planners urge that commissioners
approve OCC’s request to renew its Sunday permit and extend the swap
meet to Saturdays if certain steps such as regulating vendor space
and offering customer parking are taken.
OCC’s swap meet, started in 1982, morphed from a city-permitted
Sunday meet to a Saturday and Sunday meet over the years and remained
so until city officials put a halt to it earlier this year. The city
notified the college in March of the meet’s permit violations.
If the Planning Commission decides to let the swap meet go on all
weekend, it will be good news for both the vendors, who can go back
to making more money, and OCC, which will have more money for things
like campus maintenance and the College of Kids programs.
Since the beginning of May, when the swap meet returned to a
Sundays-only schedule, the college has lost $575,000 in potential
revenue, said George Blanc, OCC’s administrative dean of economic
development.
“We have been losing a lot, and each week it’s getting worse and
worse,” Blanc said.
The college’s first permit for the swap meet was for Sundays only
in a campus parking lot at the corner of Fairview Road and Merrimac
Way, with a maximum of 205 vendors. In 1984, a renewal was granted to
relocate the meet to the Adams Avenue parking lot, with a maximum of
275 vendors.
In the next years, the swap meet operation expanded to Saturday
without city approval, and the number of Sunday vendors increased
above the allowed number. The swap meet, in addition to classes and
other activities at OCC and the nearby Orange County Fairgrounds,
created traffic congestion and overflow parking, affecting the
surrounding community.
In May, after a couple months of discussion, the city told OCC
that the swap meet had to revert to a Sunday-only operation, with the
maximum 275 vendors. Many permanent vendors opted to abandon the
shortened swap meet if they could only sell for one day a week, Blanc
said this spring.
If the request is approved, planners recommend a swap meet vendor
area of 1,302 parking spaces -- down from about 1,811 current spaces,
said Mel Lee, an associate planner with the city.
The planners recommend not allowing the swap meet to extend beyond
the space recommended, prohibiting customers from parking in the
Coast Community College District parking lot -- which created a large
number of mid-block pedestrian crossings on Adams Avenue -- and more
traffic and parking control measures in the vicinity.
Planning Commissioner Bruce Garlich said the planners’ report on
the swap meet gives the commission enough options to work with to
reach a solution.
“It looks like there’s something in there that would work,
depending on having the [public] hearing and getting other
information I might not know about,” Garlich said.
* DEIRDRE NEWMAN covers education. She may be reached at (949)
574-4221 or by e-mail at deirdre.newman@latimes.com.
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