Bond parade may have left town

We begin with this: When the final vote tally is in, Measure F -- the $282-million school bond -- will carry the day. As of Saturday afternoon, it was passing with 56% of the vote.

That’s certainly not the 72% landslide enjoyed in 2000 by its predecessor, the $110-million Measure A bond. Nonetheless, it is a win. And at the Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s Baker Street headquarters, they’re making room in the parking lot for the Brinks trucks.

Amid the celebration of the windfall, an observation and a worry are worth noting.

You have to fling Supt. Robert Barbot and the school board props for having the moxie to ask the historically stingy taxpayers of Newport-Mesa for $282 million just five years after residents lent the district 110 million bills. After all, the district had been the target of criticism -- some of it fair, some not -- over its management of Measure A construction and its wildly ambitious estimate of what it could accomplish with the $110 million.

The sort of apologetic tone of the Measure F campaign seemed to reveal the district’s sensitivity to asking voters for so much more so soon. That voters were far less enthusiastic in their support of Measure F than they were for Measure A was evidence they weren’t happy the district was holding out its plate for another piece of cake.

Nonetheless, several generations of Newport-Mesa kids can look forward to being schooled in something other than Kennedy-era (or older) classrooms. That’s a good thing.

That Newport-Mesa voters have given the nod to nearly $400 million in bond debt over the last five years portends a worry, however.

Costa Mesa -- which in many areas is an Eisenhower-era city in age and condition -- very likely has missed the local bond parade and probably won’t be able to count on the generosity of its taxpayers for some years.

Not that that’s any great surprise.

Costa Mesa voters shot down a 2000 ballot measure to boost the city’s hotel bed tax, proving that this is a town without the stomach to tax even tourists.

The problem is Costa Mesa, at 52, is a municipality serving roughly 110,000 mobile, busy and highly demanding urbanites living and working in mostly 1950s- and ‘60s-era neighborhoods and commercial districts. It’s a town with not enough parks and athletic fields set against a backdrop of an unsightly overhead power grid. It has too few libraries, an obsolete police facility, and -- as it continues to grow -- probably not enough fire stations. And that’s only the stuff you can see.

At some point, relatively soon I would imagine, Costa Mesa may well face the same storm-water runoff and sewer system challenges that have plagued Huntington Beach for the last decade.

Correcting any combination or all of these circumstances will be a gargantuan ticket. Indeed, an ashen-faced city council learned in 2004 that the cost alone to tuck the city’s power lines underground would run somewhere near a half a billion dollars.

Given the growing din to affect large-scale improvements in Costa Mesa -- particularly on the Westside -- and the certain growth of the city’s population and subsequent demand for services and facilities, Costa Mesa might have been in a better position if it had begun talking bonds some years ago.

But for whatever reason, it didn’t. And with Costa Mesa taxpayers on the hook for a significant chunk of $400 million worth of school bonds, it may be too late.

* BYRON DE ARAKAL is a public affairs consultant and chairman of the Costa Mesa Parks and Recreation Commission. Readers may leave a message for him on the Daily Pilot hotline at (714) 966-4664 or contact him by e-mail at byronwriter@comcast.net.

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