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.