City tackles a dynamite issue

Deirdre Newman

The sale of fireworks is a politically incendiary issue. Only a

handful of cities in Orange County sell them, including Costa Mesa.

And most of those cities have wrestled with whether to continue

selling them.

On April 19, the Costa Mesa City Council approved, in concept, a

slew of suggestions by Councilman Mike Scheafer to restrict fireworks

sales. Monday, the council approved an ordinance reflecting those

restrictions.

Opinions are still divided over the issue, however, with opponents

of firework sales concerned about the proliferation of illegal

fireworks and proponents preaching personal responsibility,

patriotism and profits.

“Don’t expect the city to do everything for you,” Ramsey DeGeare

said. “You have to take personal responsibility. That’s not even in

the dictionary anymore.”

Officials in most of the cities that sell fireworks are similarly

torn. They also have to contend with illegal fireworks, since the two

normally go together, Santa Ana Fire Marshall Lori Smith said.

“They go hand-in-hand generally,” Smith said. “If you allow safe

and sane, you generally have a larger influx of illegal activity.”

Costa Mesa struggled with the issue of fireworks sales in the

early 1990s. First, voters split over whether to allow groups to keep

selling fireworks. A year later, the council, on a 3-2 vote, decided

to continue to allow safe and sane fireworks and impose some

restrictions. But former Mayor Sandra Genis, who was on the council

at the time, said she now thinks that was a bad choice.

The new rules approved Monday include reducing the type of

fireworks that can be sold and the number of fireworks stands. Also,

each high school can have a maximum of four stands.

Dave Perkins, athletic director at Costa Mesa High School, said

the sports teams at his schools will be hurt by the new rules. His

school manned 12 fireworks booths last year.

“If they diminish it like that, it will really hurt,” Perkins

said. “If it eventually goes away, we won’t be able to run our

football program worth a darn. We probably raise between $5,000 to

$6,000.”

SMALL RESTRICTIONS

Other cities that sell fireworks have also grappled with trying to

put the genie back in the bottle, or at least better control the

genie. A year and a half ago, the Buena Park City Council voted 3-2

to ban the sale of fireworks. But residents protested and put a

referendum on the ballot. Allowing fireworks sales passed with 70% of

the vote.

“The sale will continue since the people have spoken,” Buena Park

Deputy City Manager Wes Morgan said.

The city will continue to allow 32 stands, Morgan added.

Santa Ana has also considered eliminating fireworks, but the

council and the community are usually split on the issue, Smith said.

In Garden Grove, city officials have limited the number of stands

that border Anaheim, where they found a higher amount of activity.

Anaheim does not allow the sale of fireworks. They have also taken

greater effort to reduce accessibility to parks after dark, since

revelers would light fireworks there later in the evening.

“We [made those changes] a year ago and there was quite a bit of

reduction of activity in the parks and the areas abutting the areas

that don’t sell them,” City Manager Matthew Fertal said.

DON’T PARK

Parks are also a hot spot for fireworks in Costa Mesa. One of the

ordinance’s new rules would require the creation of new signs to be

posted in all city parks warning of the penalty for possessing

dangerous fireworks.

Scheafer was inspired to tweak the city’s firework rules after one

of his neighbors was severely burned last July when a sparkler she

lighted ignited her clothes. As a member of the Lions Club, Scheafer

has helped sell fireworks for the past three years and said he is not

interested in eliminating them altogether.

Perkins agrees that what happened to Scheafer’s neighbor was

unfortunate, but said he doesn’t believe restricting the sale of

fireworks will prevent incidents like that.

“I feel horrible there was a tragedy that this lady was burned

badly, but that’s the responsibility of the individual,” he said. “If

you restrict it here, they’ll just go somewhere else. If they don’t

go to Garden Grove, they’ll go to Mexico. That’s just the way it

goes.”

* DEIRDRE NEWMAN covers Costa Mesa. She may be reached at (949)

574-4221 or by e-mail at deirdre.newman@latimes.com.