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.