The Orange County Register
By Frank Mickadeit
October 26, 2009

As I foreshadowed last week, the Costa Mesa City Council on Tuesday night told the state, Come and get us.

The decision followed City Attorney Kimberly Hall Barlow‘s succinct oral report that said the city could put a measure on the ballot that, if approved by voters, would lock in land use at the Fairgrounds so that it could only be undone by another popular vote. This, two weeks after Barlow’s assistant expressed doubt.

The legal path cleared, the council acted swiftly and with unanimity. The staff will come back with ballot language to be debated. The main concern being how specific to get about restrictions on the 150-acre site. Too loose and you haven’t done much good; too restrictive and you might tie the hands of a future council that comes up with a good idea for a use that’s within the spirit of the law but not within the letter of it.

The council has until March to approve language for the June ballot. By then, the state will have sold the site. Bids are due Jan. 8, with a winner announced Jan. 14 and the contract signed by March 15.

Now we’ll see whether the state follows through on its threat to take action against the city if it puts restrictions on the property that might devalue it. Remember, that threat was issued when the council was merely going to impose a conventional land-use scheme that three council members could always undo. What the council did on Tuesday was take this nuclear.

I think we’re in court by Thanksgiving.

While all this is going on, you’ve still got a host of interests working behind the scene. Those have only grown since I last wrote on this, with the formation of a group that wants the state to simply call off the sale.

According to Derail the Sale’s PR firm, Faubel Public Affairs, this coalition includes former council members Sandy Genis and Jay Humphrey; equestrians like Theresa Sears and Chuck Fry; commercial interests, including swap meet owner Jeff Teller and vendors; and labor.

(To refresh, other separate interests are: the Fair Board; the nonprofit founded by board members to buy the Fairgrounds; Save the Fair, which is pushing the ballot measure; the county, which might want to buy the Fairgrounds; and, finally, the city, which is also considering a bid on the Fairgrounds. All of these interests and others are expected to jam Costa Mesa City Hall at 9 a.m. Monday for a town hall meeting co-hosted by assemblymen Van Tran and Jose Solorio.)

Jim Righeimer, architect of Save the Fair, is leery about any group that wants to end the sale, especially one led by Faubel, which helped kill the airport at El Toro and paved (hah!) the way for the Great Park. That’s because, as he posited at the council meeting, keeping the Fairgrounds in public hands, with its need to disclose contracts, makes it less competitive.

His theory is that the Great Park leaders want to see the Fairgrounds that way so they can continue to steal acts from Costa Mesa – like they did Cirque du Soleil – and become O.C.’s de facto fairgrounds. Riggy says they’re already building what’s essentially a replica of the Fairgrounds’ Centennial Farm and they’re planning an outdoor amphitheater that could rival the Pacific.

Faubel’s Brian Lochrie says flat out that there’s no G.P. connection to Derail the Sale. The only goal is to stop the sale. It would be foolish, he says, for a public entity in O.C. to swoop in and buy the Fairgrounds, thus sending O.C. taxpayers’ money to Sacramento to pay for a facility O.C. taxpayers already own.

My take: The motivation of some of Derail the Sale leaders’ is their own special interest, not the citizenry at large. Nonetheless, this is not a move by Great Park leaders. Which doesn’t mean the Great Park Board isn’t going to keep coming after Fairgrounds’ entertainment.

To show you how far this Fairgrounds paranoia has gone, though, within three hours of my conversation with Lochrie, I show up on a local political blog as now being Righeimer’s “conduit.” Don’t you get it? I disagree with Righeimer on part of this. Also, my roommate, Wayne Gross, is Teller’s lawyer in this matter. If I was going to be anyone’s conduit, wouldn’t I be Derail the Sales’?

If truth is the first casualty of political war, paranoia is its first offspring.