2 options for sports fields at Fairview Park, city staffers say

Baseball diamonds, soccer fields and football in Costa Mesa’s Fairview Park? With lights? Artificial turf?

According to a city engineer, they’re all possible — but not without spending as much as $15 million and doing major excavation work.

In what was probably its last meeting for the year, the Fairview Park Citizens Advisory Committee met Wednesday to hear two options for adding athletic facilities into the park’s southeast quadrant, a roughly 45-acre space primarily occupied by the Orange County Model Engineers’ ridable trains and facilities.

The panel didn’t approve or deny the concepts, following City Council direction March 17 that it wait until a master plan update of the city’s parks system is completed, probably next year.

City engineer Bart Mejia said that if the city doesn’t change the model engineers’ tracks, the best option would be to construct a lighted, artificial turf field for football, soccer, lacrosse, field hockey and similar sports. The cost would be $1.5 million to $2 million, he said.

If the city reroutes the tracks, it could potentially add two soccer fields, a multiuse field and two baseball/softball fields that face each other and fit a second multiuse field between them. That plan would also include new facilities for the model engineers, a “native habitat zone” and play areas, Mejia said.

All that could cost between $12 million and $15 million, Mejia said, and require flattening of the quadrant’s hilly sections. It would also keep intact the area’s vernal pools — temporary wetlands that collect water and host various animal life, including San Diego fairy shrimp, an endangered species.

The plans were met with skepticism from some members of the public, who have long contended that Fairview Park should be free of athletic fields and remain a natural space.

Resident Cindy Brenneman compared the proposals to “sticking a square peg in a round hole.”

“It’s not gonna work,” she said.

Some local archaeologists expressed concern about the plans’ effects on a Native American archaeological site where mysterious and rare cogged stones have been found. The stones might have been part of a sun deity worshipping ritual, said Gary Stickel, tribal archaeologist for the Kizh-Gabrieleño, who once lived in the area.

“These sites are the equivalent, to these people, of the Vatican or Jerusalem,” Stickel said. “These sites are your Stonehenge ... this city needs to preserve these sites.”

He added that he and others are going to be petitioning authorities in Sacramento to add the park to a Native American “sacred lands” listing.

Costa Mesa resident Lou Desandro called the athletic fields a “sensible solution” in a city that needs them.

The committee has kept the rest of the 208-acre park largely untouched, he noted.

“This one quadrant, though, does have some potential,” Desandro said.