Planners sign off on Costa Mesa’s general plan
The years-in-the-making update to Costa Mesa’s general plan cleared a major hurdle Monday after the Planning Commission voted unanimously to recommend it to the City Council.
“I think Costa Mesa is moving in the right direction and I think this general plan is an embodiment of the direction that we’re moving in,” Commissioner Colin McCarthy said.
The general plan is a state-mandated document that acts as a blueprint for future development in the city.
“I think that it is important that we provide flexibility for future city councils so that they can make decisions that address concerns or needs of the city well into the future,” said Commissioner Stephan Andranian. “I think that’s an important thing and I think that this document provides for that.”
The general plan next heads to the Airport Land Use Commission for a hearing, tentatively scheduled for next month. After that, it would go before the City Council.
The proposed update would permit more residential units, particularly high-density units, than what is allowed in the current general plan.
During the Planning Commission’s four public hearings on the plan, some residents said they were concerned that new development allowed under the revised document would create more traffic, harm Costa Mesa’s air quality and generally degrade the local quality of life.
“This needs to be rewritten to address the concerns of the residents,” activist Cynthia McDonald said Monday. “We need more open space, we need to maintain our neighborhood character, we need walkability, bikeability — a plan that has some teeth in it.”
The general plan does include a few major land-use changes, such as repurposing the site of the Fairview Developmental Center. The center, a state-run facility off Harbor Boulevard that provides services and housing to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, is proposed to close in the coming years.
The general plan proposes setting a portion of the site aside as open space and capping the number of homes that could be built there at 500.
Three-hundred homes would be part of a proposed project, nicknamed Shannon’s Mountain, that would include housing for the developmentally disabled.
In a letter to the city dated April 15, the state Department of General Services, which oversees Fairview, objected to the cap, calling it a “short-sighted proposal” that is “likely to limit future decisions regarding transit service, as well as private investment and development decisions.”
Costa Mesa should “consider allowing a greater number of units in the FDC to maximize the reuse of a valuable infill site,” the letter reads.
Another major change in the general plan would be the creation of a “residential incentive overlay” that would allow owners of certain properties along Harbor and Newport boulevards, particularly motels, to rezone their land from commercial to high-density residential, with up to 40 units per acre.
The program, city officials say, could help encourage owners of so-called problem motels to redevelop — thus getting rid of properties city officials say are blighted and hotbeds for crime and drug use.
Others have criticized the idea, saying getting rid of the motels would rob the city of a source of de-facto low-income housing.
Affordable-housing advocates have regularly lobbied the commission to include language in the general plan that would require affordable units be built within new projects that make use of the overlay incentive.
Commissioners declined to do so Monday, pointing out that the City Council majority rejected the idea of adopting such “inclusionary housing” requirements last week.
