Crowds expected at swap meeting
Lolita Harper
Community members, vendors, city leaders and college officials
will trade ideas today on the contentious Orange Coast College swap
meet during a study session that looks to be as heated as it will be
crowded.
College officials and the vendors they represent plan to cram into
the first floor conference room at City Hall, hoping to haggle out a
deal with the city. Proponents of the flea-market style campus
shopping venue hope to barter increased traffic circulation and all
the required businesses licenses to return to Saturday operation.
Anthony Beaumont, the agent for the campus swap meet, argues the
city was never specific in its request for business licenses and
never articulated the swap meet would need anything different from
its previous accreditation.
“[The applicable city municipal code section] requires that those
permits be ‘in writing and in a form or forms to be established by
the City Council,’” Beaumont wrote in a letter to the city. “The city
has been unable to produce such a form to date, almost certainly due
to the fact the city only has two swap meets, and they are both long
established affairs, having been permitted long ago.”
Swap meet vendors have been running a Sunday-only swap meet for
almost eight months, since college officials agreed to scale back its
operations because of traffic problems on Fairview Road. During that
time, city and college officials worked together, a private
consultant was hired, options were proposed to the Planning
Commission and a new swap meet was approved with an average of 260
vendors per day.
Then, an 11th-hour appeal by resident Paul Wilbur -- who claims
commissioners don’t have authority over the swap meet -- brought the
item before the council. Council members paid heed to some of
Wilbur’s concerns about applicable business licenses and added many
of their own for staff to address during the study session.
College officials argued vigorously against any more delays,
saying it would cause vendors to miss out on the lifeblood of retail
sales: holiday shopping. The council said the outstanding issues
needed to be resolved before it took any action.
Councilwoman Libby Cowan said she was primarily concerned with
alleviating traffic on Fairview Road but saw no details on how that
would be accomplished in the consultant’s report.
According to a staff report, traffic backs up onto Fairview
because of poor organization and circulation in the swap meet parking
lot. The college has proposed various directional signs and other
traffic control measures.
* LOLITA HARPER covers Costa Mesa. She may be reached at (949)
574-4275 or by e-mail at lolita.harper@latimes.com.
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