Keep recreation out of the crosshairs
At 50, Costa Mesa is not unlike those of us who are staring down the
barrel of middle age. It’s not old, but it’s not young either. The
knees hurt from time to time. The hair’s thinning in some places and
fading to shades of gray in others. But still we’ve got some energy
and a half century of wisdom behind us. Or so we should hope.
What I have seen of Costa Mesa at 50, during my yearlong tenure on
the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission, is a city that indeed has
energy and a lot of hope for a better future. These are things to
hold on to. But there’s plenty to fret about, too.
The hopeful things about Costa Mesa are these. In the 1990 to 2000
census period, the city’s population of 5- to 9-year-olds increased
by nearly a third. Its population of 10- to 14-year-olds almost
doubled. And its contingent of 15- to 19-year olds grew by nearly
40%. Clearly, Costa Mesa is a family town -- a place where parents
feel good about raising their youngsters. That’s a good thing.
Another hopeful sign is the outstanding quality of our Parks and
Recreation Department programs. Costa Mesa provides thousands of
children opportunities to learn, run, laugh and play in a world that
increasingly demands more of their parents’ time, which means having
fewer ticks on the clock to spend with their kids.
That aside, here’s where the furrowed brow comes in. From several
fronts, an ill wind is blowing through town that seems to want to
uproot and dismantle many of the recreational institutions -- and
their support structures -- that keep our city’s youngsters happy,
engaged, fit and off the streets.
Ponder these headlines for a moment.
Last summer, members of the Mese Verde Villas Homeowners Assn.
marched -- with attorney in tow -- before the Parks and Recreation
Commission and the City Council. Their condominiums, sandwiched on
Iowa Street between TeWinkle Intermediate School and the San Diego
Freeway, they claim, were being inundated with the sounds and sites
of too much Little League baseball, an onslaught of AYSO soccer
games, and the usual symptoms that go with kids and families playing
organized, supervised sports on the weekend and after school. They
demanded that the city reduce the number of hours our city’s youth
could play on these fields.
Just two weeks ago these same folks stood before the city’s
Planning Commission, lobbying to force Costa Mesa Little League
groups to remove their sponsor banners during the week from the
outfield fences at the TeWinkle School’s baseball diamonds. The
gripe? The banners are an eyesore, a “blight” on the community.
That’s right, a blight. Never mind these banners help keep
registration fees low so more kids can play baseball.
Sporadically, over the weeks and months in between, various other
neighborhoods throughout the city routinely lobbed complaints at City
Hall about too much use of our city’s athletic fields. Apparently,
there’s just too much playin’ going on out there.
That recreation in our city is in the crosshairs comes from other
quarters, too.
Writing in the March 13 edition of the Daily Pilot, Councilman
Allan Mansoor lit after city-sponsored recreation programs as if they
were boils. Arguing in favor of budget cuts before contemplating any
new revenue sources to rescue Costa Mesa from its thorny financial
pickle, the mayor pro tem’s piece focused, nearly exclusively, on
reducing recreational services to Costa Mesa’s children.
None of this is to say that athletic fields should be used 24
hours a day, seven days a week, or that our city should spend its
money like tanked sailors on shore leave. But given Costa Mesa’s
healthy influx of children over the last decade, I would argue these
examples demonstrate attitudes and leadership that are precisely
wrong at this point in our city’s history. At the very least, they
are not in the long-term interest of the whole Costa Mesa community.
Why?
Consider what the future recreational demand of this city holds
for us. According to the Costa Mesa Parks and Recreation Master Plan,
our city will need 18.9 youth baseball fields for every 26,200 Costa
Mesans by 2025. Right now, we have one for every 26,200 folks. We
will need 25.1 soccer fields. We now have 17.1. We will need 27.7
tennis courts. Today we have 12. And we will need 2.6 skate parks. We
have zero at the moment -- though final plans have been approved for
the city’s first.
Clearly, Costa Mesa doesn’t have nearly enough playing fields.
Worse, we don’t have the land or the money to build more. We might
have, had we set out to begin purchasing more park land back in 2000,
when former Councilman Joe Erickson’s idea to increase of the city’s
transient occupancy tax for just such a purpose was placed on the
November ballot. Voters rejected the measure, but not by much. Had it
passed, perhaps the Mesa Verde Villas folks would have less “impact”
and “blight” on their neighborhood by now.
Mansoor’s hunt to cut recreation programs dresses more like an
idea of ideology than one purely rooted in fiscal concerns. Many of
the city’s recreation programs either break even or generate
revenues. Some cost the city money, but not so significantly as to
make a material impact on the budget if eliminated. It’s sort of like
saying you’re going to cut calories, so you tell the waiter to hold
the parsley on that steak dinner you just ordered.
Alternatively, cutting these programs denies our city’s kids the
healthy alternatives to, say, spray painting public property, joining
a gang or lifting a pack of gum from the corner liquor store.
Now that you know this, on Monday the City Council will noodle on
a range of options to fine-tune our city’s budget. They’ll consider,
again, the possibility of placing a transient occupancy tax increase
before the voters (a tax, by the way, that tourists pay) and with it
the opportunity for more fields for our kids to play on. They’ll also
consider cutting several recreational programs, which is really
cutting opportunities to keep kids out of trouble.
Let’s hope the City Council’s majority makes the right decisions
for the sake of Costa Mesa’s young and its future.
* BYRON DE ARAKAL is a member of the Costa Mesa Parks and
Recreation Commission and a former Daily Pilot columnist.
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