SUNDAY STORY:The man, the dream

He is rarely able to toss a football. Most of the time, Jim Scott is confined to a wheelchair, and in his Estancia High School jersey — covered in patches from the school’s championship teams — he maintains a sporty look. His friends use words like “pit bull” and “military” to describe him, but his voice, for the time being, is mostly silent.

Scott, who helped launch the campaign 10 years ago to bring a stadium to Estancia, has sat on the sidelines for the last few months as his dream became a reality. In April, the 80-year-old Costa Mesa resident suffered a stroke, and it may take years for his health to improve. When the Newport-Mesa Unified School District breaks ground on the Estancia stadium in January, then, Scott will probably not wield one of the shovels — but his colleagues hope that he can perform another feat.

That would be a single victory lap around the Estancia track. It may take a scooter, it may take an hour to complete, but the other members of Costa Mesa United want to see their founding father make it once around.

“I don’t care how Jim does it, but that would be one of the nicer moments in the history of Costa Mesa as a city,” said John Ursini, the owner of the Newport Rib Co. restaurant and a member of the nonprofit group.

Earlier this month, the Newport-Mesa school district announced that the Estancia stadium would be the first project started under Measure F, the $282-million school renovation bond that voters approved in November 2005. Paul Reed, the district’s deputy superintendent, has estimated that the work will take about 14 months. By the time Estancia plays its first home game, the district may have started building an Olympic-sized swimming pool at Costa Mesa High School — the other project that Scott co-founded Costa Mesa United to fund.

“It took a fanatical, pit bull persistence to get this to happen,” his son, Jim Scott Jr., said “It’s like a pit bull because you grab onto an idea and a million people say no, and then one person says yes.”

There may have been a time when only one person wanted to boost Costa Mesa’s athletic facilities, but when Scott first floated the idea in the mid-1990s, he found at least one kindred spirit.

In 1996, Bruce Williams, a Costa Mesa High parent, approached the district about building a stadium on the Farm, a large parcel of land near the school. Williams planned a fundraiser, but soon after, the district sold the property to the city. Undeterred, Williams and his wife, architect Michelle Pettit Williams, turned to Scott, a former Estancia parent who ran the Battle for the Bell football games between the two schools.

Scott, a Texas native and World War II veteran, had founded Seco Seals, an aerospace gasket company, in Costa Mesa in 1969. As a young man, he helped develop conical seals for America’s space program. Even though his youngest child graduated from Estancia in 1981, he remained dedicated to the school.

Soon, the small group — which included Scott’s wife, Joan — drafted an idea for a stadium at Estancia and a larger pool at Costa Mesa High. Wherever the facilities ended up, Pettit Williams said, Scott and his clique were determined to give their city a home field; the schools’ teams play most of their games at Newport Harbor High School and elsewhere.

“Costa Mesa didn’t want to be the stepchild to the Newport schools that seemed to get all the nicer facilities,” she said.

In 1999, with the district having made millions off its sale of the Farm, Scott rallied a group of community members to ask the school board to pledge $500,000 for architectural drawings. The plans for the Costa Mesa pool would change over time, which kept the project off the first Measure F list, but the outlines for the Estancia stadium remained largely the same.

What didn’t remain the same was the cost. According to Jim Scott Jr., the founders of Costa Mesa United first estimated the price for both the stadium and pool at $3 million. By the time they approached the school board, the prediction was up to $6 million. When the school district assembled its Measure F schedule in May of this year, the costs had skyrocketed: $9.2 million for the stadium, $8 million for planning and construction of the pool.

“We were very confident,” said David Brooks, the school board president and a Costa Mesa United member, remembering the early days. “We had set goals and everything. We were thinking two, three years would be all we needed.”

Just as $3 million turned into $17.2 million, two or three years turned into a decade.

After a few years as an unofficial, grass-roots organization, Costa Mesa United launched as a nonprofit in October 2002. Scott took the title of chairman, while Brooks was president, Pettit Williams vice president and Scott Jr. the treasurer. The group held its first public event at the Battle for the Bell, with Harbor Boulevard of Cars presenting $25,000 checks for the stadium and pool, and fundraiser David Grubbs announcing $2.5 million in pledges.

In the ensuing years, the group secured a pledge from the Costa Mesa City Council and garnered donations from a number of businesses. As construction costs mounted, some members grew disillusioned and drifted away from Costa Mesa United, but Scott never left the helm.

“Jim was a visionary in the true sense of the word, and early in the process, he was someone you almost needed to follow,” Ursini said. “His leadership was military with the coach’s slant. You wanted to run through walls for him, and his enthusiasm for the project rubbed off on everybody in the early years.”

Scott, the owner of a half a dozen aerospace patents, prided himself on his toughness. A few years ago, the Estancia faculty made him a jersey with his nickname stenciled on it: “SLUF,” which stands for “short little ugly fellow.”

In August 2005, as Costa Mesa United’s goals grew more elusive, the Newport-Mesa district provided a glimmer of hope. Just five years after voters approved Measure A, a $110-million bond to clean and repair schools, the district placed a second bond measure on the ballot to create new facilities altogether. Two of the proposed projects: the stadium and the pool.

On Nov. 8, 2005, a number of Costa Mesa United members gathered at the Newport Rib Co. to await the election results. It would take weeks before the final tallies would be certified, but within a few hours, Measure F seemed to just barely have the edge it needed. The measure, which needed 55% support, eventually passed with 56.1%.

Even though the nonprofit had never reached its fundraising goal, many of its members felt vindicated.

“It’s amazing what you can do eventually just by not going away,” Pettit Williams said.

Brooks said that Costa Mesa United would donate the funds it had raised over the last decade — around $4 million in cash and pledges — to the school district. The group plans to continue, however, as a supporter for other youth sports around Costa Mesa.

Joan Scott said that her husband no longer understands everything around him, but he’s aware of Measure F and the groundbreaking next January. Whether he takes that victory lap, though, he’s traveled distance enough.

“We’ve never given up,” she said. “Mr. Scott has never given up, through the high times and the low times.”

The following is a first-project list for the Measure F school bond, as assembled by the Newport-Mesa Unified School District in May. Except for the Estancia High School stadium, which has been identified as the first project scheduled to start in January, the items on the list are not in chronological order.

Project

Type Of Work

School Cost

Stadium

Construction

Estancia High School

$9.2 million

Gymnasium

Construction

TeWinkle Middle School

$5 million

Robins-Loats Hall

Construction

Newport Harbor High School

$36.2 million

Science classrooms

Construction

All elementary schools

$2.1 million

Aquatics center

Planning and redesign

Costa Mesa High School

$1.5 million

Performing arts center

Planning

Costa Mesa High School

$1 million

Middle school complex

Planning

Costa Mesa High School

$1.5 million

Middle school complex

Planning

Corona del Mar High School

$1.5 million

Performing arts center

Planning

Corona del Mar High School

$1 million