SOUNDING OFF:

The Costa Mesa City Council demonstrated, once again, the wisdom of policy that requires it to cease deliberations at midnight during prolonged meetings.

In its meeting Tuesday, Nov. 6, the council should have stopped at midnight, but just kept on plowing away until finally folding its tent at 1:10 a.m.

This particular meeting was contentious, to say the least. The fate of skate parks, dog parks, Lions Park and Fairview Park were interwoven into several agenda items. To its credit, the council managed to sort that spaghetti bowl of issues.

Not necessarily in order, it decided to: 1) Permit the construction of a temporary building to house a donated model train collection adjacent to the model train site in Fairview Park, gambling that its presence and that of the collection would grease the skids for future grants to fund the creation of an interpretive center in the near future; 2) Declined to open the Fairview Park Master Plan for consideration of the placement of a dog park and skate park within its boundaries; 3) Declined to authorize the expenditure of nearly $70,000 to create a conceptual design for a skate park at Lions Park, effectively quashing the move to place such a facility at that location; 4) Blew off the suggestion to close Park Avenue north of 18th Street to facilitate the creation of a skate park at Lions Park; 5) Authorized the city staff to pursue aggressively the possible acquisition of the recently-vacated Air National Guard location behind TeWinkle Park.

There were several interesting moments during that marathon meeting. For example, as the three-hour discussion of a skate park in Lions Park was coming to a close, but before the final vote, Mayor Pro Tem Eric Bever seemed to blow a gasket. He expressed extreme disappointment in his colleagues, stating “I’m actually kind of ashamed to be sitting up here tonight with you folks on this issue,” and later invited them to let him know when the next discussion of skate parks would take place so he could just stay home.

This display seemed to shock everyone in attendance, including the other council members. Linda Dixon’s reply to him was appropriate — she told him to “get over it.”

Eventually, the female majority on the council directed staff to investigate city parks for possible placement of “pocket skate parks” and to hire a Realtor to investigate possible locations for a new, larger skate park.

During the discussions of the Fairview Park issue, which began after midnight, representatives from the Costa Mesa Bark Park Foundation plus former mayor Sandra Genis told the council that the location earmarked for a possible dog park in Fairview Park was unacceptable.

The majority of the dozens of speakers who stayed until midnight to participate in the debate of the future of Fairview Park were on the side of retaining its passive character.

They begged the council to protect the critters that call the park home. Representatives of the model train group described stories of vandalism by skateboarders and showed photos of graffiti to emphasize that a neighboring skate park would require constant supervision.

So, local tree-huggers can breathe a little more easily today because the critters in Fairview Park have been given a reprieve. And, the skateboarders in our city — who waited a generation for the first skate park — will have to wait a little longer to see how the City Council will resolve its frustrations and pent-up demand for more skate facilities.

GEOFF WEST is a resident of Costa Mesa.