Costa Mesa : Plan Calls for Builders to Pay for Street Work

With office and commercial development set to more than double in Costa Mesa by 1990, a major land developer on Tuesday outlined a $4-million program of privately funded street improvements designed to ease traffic congestion in the city.

“We’re forging ahead, and we’re going to stay ahead of the transportation situation in this city,” Malcolm Ross, spokesman for C. J. Segerstrom & Sons, said of the program during a press conference. Under the plan, developers will pay for and manage a variety of street widening and traffic signal improvements to help compensate for the impact of growth.

The developer fee program in Costa Mesa is part of a $29-million plan for traffic improvements throughout the central county to accommodate rapid development scheduled for a 15-square-mile area of Santa Ana, Costa Mesa, Irvine and Newport Beach near the San Diego Freeway.

Total office space in the area is forecast to grow from 24 billion square feet to nearly 36.5 billion square feet by 1990. Hotels are going up at an even faster rate, from 2.5 million square feet to 7.2 million by 1990.

Costa Mesa will see an increase of 4.9 million square feet in commercial, industrial and office space over the next few years.

Construction on many of the traffic improvements targeted for the city is set to begin over the next few weeks.

Projects include widening of Bristol Street near South Coast Plaza, new four-way signals at Sunflower Avenue and Raitt Street, a new turn lane at Fairview Road and Sunflower and widening of existing northbound off-ramps at the Harbor Boulevard and Fairview Road exits of the San Diego Freeway. Also, a two-year study of possible new access points to the freeway between the Costa Mesa Freeway and the Santa Ana River will begin.