O.C. Fairgrounds sale still on

It’s official: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won’t stop the sale of the Orange County Fairgrounds.

Even after three council members and the city manager traveled to Sacramento on Monday to meet with Schwarzenegger and try and persuade him to cancel the sale, he has decided to go through with selling the 150-acre property in Costa Mesa, said Mike Naple, a spokesman for the governor’s office.

Aside from not giving the city of Costa Mesa what it wanted, the governor’s office shut Mayor Pro Tem Wendy Leece out of the meeting with Schwarzenegger.

The governor’s office did not accept the city’s notice of a closed-session City Council meeting in the state capital, said Mayor Allan Mansoor, who traveled there with Leece, Councilwoman Katrina Foley and City Manager Allan Roeder to meet with Schwarzenegger.

Because three of the five council members were meeting with Schwarzenegger, the city officially noticed the meeting as a special closed City Council session and produced an agenda for it. But the governor’s office did not want to create the appearance of any open-meeting law violations, Leece said.

Though Leece spent a week preparing her talking points for the meeting, she said the important thing was to make the case to the governor against the sale of the fairgrounds — a task that her fellow council members accomplished, she said.

After emerging from the meeting, Mansoor and Foley said they didn’t believe the governor was going to call off the sale.

“I wasn’t expecting that he would call it off,” Mansoor said. “I would be pleasantly surprised if he calls it off. It’s just a feeling, but we had to give it our best shot, and we did.”

According to Foley, the governor told the city officials that if he were in the city’s position, he would fight to keep the fairgrounds as is, but that he is concerned about the state’s budget deficit.

“He said he understands that fairs are an American tradition,” she said.

But community pressure will not let up on the governor and his office to undo the sale.

Former Costa Mesa Mayor Sandy Genis, who heads the Orange County Fairgrounds Preservation Society, and other society members are scheduled to meet today with officials from the Department of General Services, the state agency in charge of selling the fairgrounds. Genis and her group will also argue against the sale.

The 150-acre fairgrounds was put up for sale in October as part of a plan to sell state-owned properties to help the budget deficit. Bids are due Friday.

What Do You Think?

What should Costa Mesa and Orange County do now that Gov. Schwarzenegger has decided to go through with the sale of the Orange County Fairgrounds? Send us an e-mail at dailypilot@latimes.com or leave a comment on our website.