Meeting will focus on possibility of sports fields at Fairview Park

After being postponed for months, discussions about building sports fields in Costa Mesa’s Fairview Park are coming back to the forefront.

The park’s citizens advisory committee will meet Wednesday night to talk about adding baseball/softball facilities, basketball/handball courts, a roller hockey surface and multipurpose athletic fields to the park’s southeast quadrant.

The August meeting of the committee generated a record turnout, with more than 125 people crowding the room. The committee also received more than 80 letters.

But the committee decided to hold off discussion of the proposals, which have long generated heated debate in the community between those who want to keep the 208-acre park free of new development and those who contend the land would be a good spot for more athletic fields, particularly for youth sports.

The nine-member committee of City Council appointees has already rejected adding sports fields to the other three quadrants in Fairview Park, but hasn’t decided about the roughly 45-acre southeast quadrant, the site of the tracks for the Orange County Model Engineers.

The rideable train setup uses about 40 acres of the quadrant. The Model Engineers, a volunteer-led nonprofit, has called Fairview Park home since 1988. In those years, the group has constructed about five miles of track, a station and a repair yard.

Some members of the Fairview Park Citizens Advisory Committee have said they believe sports fields would be suitable alongside the model train setup, using spaces not taken up by tracks.

Should a majority of the committee agree to the sport field idea, city staff would conduct a preliminary analysis for the committee to examine at another meeting. If a majority gives a second approval, the idea would go to the Parks and Recreation Commission for further review.

Wednesday’s meeting begins at 6 p.m. in the Costa Mesa Neighborhood Community Center, 1845 Park Ave.