River park plan rolls on

If you haven’t heard of the Orange Coast River Park, take a stroll through Fairview Park in Costa Mesa in a few weeks.

Signs will soon go up at Fairview Park that announce the site as a “participant in the future Orange Coast River Park.” It’s one of a number of baby steps supporters have taken recently toward creating the 1,000-acre park that would include open space and nature preserves along the Santa Ana River in Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach and unincorporated areas of Orange County.

Environmentalists have been planning the river park for a number of years, but progress has been slow because funding has been scarce, and a number of committees and bureaucracies are involved.

The signs aren’t the only forward movement. Newport Beach City Council members on Tuesday voted to accept a $5,000 grant to plan for habitat protection and recreational activities along the Santa Ana River channel. The channel isn’t technically part of the planned river park, but amenities there would complement the park, said Newport Beach Assistant City Manager Dave Kiff. The grant comes from the Wildlands Conservancy, based in Oak Glen, Calif.

It’s not yet clear what kind of planning the grant will allow, and it will be difficult to put anything in the river channel in Newport because that stretch of the river swells its banks twice a day with the tides, Kiff said.

But he envisioned improvements to the biking and walking environment, either with signs and interpretive elements or restoration of native plant habitats.

In Costa Mesa, “we have a strong interest in creating a continuous natural park belt that would span Fairview Park and extend down into Talbert Nature Preserve,” city parks and recreation commissioner Byron de Arakal said.

The signs mentioning the river park will help make people aware of the plans, he said.

The other cities that may participate in the park also are expected to create signs touting it, said Nancy Gardner, a Newport Beach environmentalist who is on a planning committee for the river park.

The committee also is running a contest for students of local high schools to design park “gateways” in each of the three cities that may participate.

“It’s a reality in everybody’s mind,” Gardner said. “It’s just the various pieces still have a ways to go before we can get them together.”