Costa Mesa awaits a late bloomer

Deirdre Newman

If the city is encouraging its residents to clean up their

properties, it should also take care of its own.

That’s the attitude that inspired the City Council to approve a

community garden on a vacant dirt lot at the corner of Charle and

Hamilton streets in December 2001.

But more than a year later, the dirt lot is still there, and

councilwoman Libby Cowan wants to know why it’s taking the city so

long to spiff the place up.

“It seems to me that something should be happening out there,”

Cowan said at Monday’s meeting.

The culprit?

Sidewalks, said Andres Maciel, an engineer for the Costa Mesa

Parks and Recreation Department.

The city has a program to renovate sidewalks all around the city,

and although the sidewalk in front of the dirt lot is one of the

priorities, it hasn’t happened yet, Maciel said.

Construction is slated to start in early March at the latest and

should be done by April, paving the way for the garden to finally

blossom, Maciel said.

“You have to have the sidewalks before you do anything else, so we

can proceed with the entrance,” Maciel said.

The garden, designed as a community building project for the

neighborhood, will feature 42 gardening plots and a wrought-iron

fence around it. It will cost about $80,000 to build. Some of that

will come from state grant funding.

“It’s going to look like a first-class community garden,” Maciel

said.