Cities run parks differently

Deirdre Newman

Costa Mesa resident and parks lover Robert Graham thinks his city

could have come up with better plans for Fairview Park.

Especially, he says, if the city had a worker dedicated to

watching over the city’s parks.

If they did, maybe the Parks and Recreation Commission wouldn’t

have approved developing a new area in lower Fairview Park with the

only way to access it being a steep trail through a 70-foot bluff,

Graham said.

Newport Beach, in contrast, has a director who oversees parks, a

parks and trees superintendent and a parks supervisor for the city’s

40-plus parks, said Dave Niederhaus, the city’s general services

director responsible for parks.

The last department head in charge of parks in Costa Mesa was

Keith Van Holt, who retired in 1999. If the city had replaced him,

instead of splitting his responsibilities between two departments,

parks projects would be more thoroughly analyzed and developed with

balance, Graham said.

“It’s the type of thing where you blend human beings with

facilities,” Graham said. “When you separate them and don’t have one

person at the top, you have people trying to do recreational programs

who don’t have too much to do with the facilities -- they just use

them. Then, you have the guy who maintains the facilities but doesn’t

have anything to do with getting new ones or improving them.”

Costa Mesa City Manager Allan Roeder defends the split -- with

maintenance of the city’s 28 parks handled by the Public Works

Department and recreational uses taken care of by the Administrative

Services Department.

“I think the maintenance manager and the recreation manager do a

really good job of running programs out of [the Recreation Division]

and maintaining the facilities those programs operate at, but they

don’t need to be physically together in the same department,” Roeder

said. “And, we also don’t need a director whose function it is to

oversee both of them. One of the real things that has been a real,

positive outgrowth of all of this is it has allowed us to put more

resources than historically available into park design and park

development.”

And even if there still was a parks director, he or she wouldn’t

be able to override the Fairview Park Master Plan, which was crafted

with input by the community and approved by the City Council, Roeder

said.

When Van Holt -- whose official title was community services

director -- retired, along with some other retirements in his area,

city officials seized the chance to combine all city maintenance

functions into one department, Roeder said. And even though park

directors were usually involved with the early stages of design and

development of new parks and recreation facilities, the construction

would be done by Public Works, Roeder said.

When that position disappeared, the recreation division became

involved with the preliminary design, Roeder added.

In Newport Beach, parks development involve Niederhaus, the

general services director, the public works director and the

recreation director, Niederhaus said.

Having a parks superintendent is extremely valuable because of his

technical knowledge, Niederhaus said.

“Development issues are very complex on parks now, with

environmental documents and so forth, so you need that hands-on

person who has technical knowledge of maintaining native plants and

horticulture,” Niederhaus said. “But you also need input from the

recreation side, too, to balance out, say, active parks.”

Costa Mesa has a full-time engineer who works on park development

projects and design and a part-time consultant whose sole charge is

Fairview Park development, Roeder said.

But dividing these responsibilities causes a lack of vision,

Graham said. And that vision could be helpful, for example, in

finding a way for the city to take over the maintenance of the grassy

meadow area at Talbot Park, which is owned by the county, thus saving

it from eradication, Graham said.

The county is considering removing the grass because of underuse

and the desire to replace it with something more natural to

complement the rest of the park, county landscape architect Ernest

Seidel said.

The city doesn’t have the financial resources to take over

maintenance of the grass, Public Works Director Bill Morris said.

But, even so, a parks director would have at least tried to come

up with some sort of creative solution, Graham said.

“You look at the money [the city] spent that it didn’t have to [on

other things],” Graham said. “There’s always money they can come up

with. That’s the prettiest park in our city, even though it’s not

[owned by] the city.”