Why Every Park in Costa Mesa Seems to Be Under Construction Right Now
If you have tried to walk the lake loop at TeWinkle Park this year, or driven past the chain-link now wrapping the playground at Ketchum-Libolt on the Westside, you already know the pattern. Costa Mesa is not fixing one park. It is fixing three, at the same time, with three different funding sources, and the reason has less to do with scheduling convenience than with a number the city only recently put on paper.
Start on the Eastside, at Lions Park, where the change is smallest in footprint but most visible in daily use. In February, the Costa Mesa City Council unanimously approved an operating agreement putting Neat Coffee into a new 1,100-square-foot cafe kiosk at 1845 Park Avenue. The kiosk itself was funded jointly, with Supervisor Katrina Foley contributing $1.2 million and the city's capital improvement program adding another $1.1 million. The city solicited proposals from more than 25 local vendors before a review panel ranked Neat Coffee highest on qualifications and community fit. The arrangement also includes a revenue-share clause: half of the city's net proceeds from the cafe will go toward maintaining the Donald Dungan and Mesa Verde libraries, under an existing agreement with Orange County Public Libraries. A coffee kiosk sounds like a minor civic footnote until you notice it is structurally tied to library funding, which makes it one of the more unusual small-business deals the city has signed in years.
Cross town to TeWinkle Park, the 49-acre anchor named for Charles TeWinkle, Costa Mesa's first mayor after the city incorporated in 1953, and the project is bigger and messier. The park's lakes have been under repair since early this year: crews drained the upper lake, transferred its fish and wildlife down to the lower lake, replaced the liner, and by mid-June had refilled the upper lake and moved that wildlife back home. Biologists from Endemic Environmental Services handled a less photogenic part of the job, relocating dozens of invasive turtles that had colonized the lakes over the years. The lower lake is next, meaning the project is roughly halfway through what city officials have described as a nine-month rehabilitation. Separately, and with less public fanfare, the council also voted to more than double the size of the TeWinkle skate park, approving a $2 million expansion that adds a concrete pump track, a clover-style bowl, a snake run into an expanded street course, and a beginner area. Two capital projects, one address, two very different user groups.
Then there is Ketchum-Libolt Park on the Westside, the smallest of the three sites and the one with the most personal history behind it. The park was dedicated in 2005 to honor Costa Mesa Police Officers James "Dave" Ketchum and John "Mike" Libolt, the only CMPD officers to lose their lives in the line of duty, killed in a helicopter crash on March 10, 1987. At just over a third of an acre, the existing park has offered little more than a playground, a seating area, and a concrete pad for the city's mobile recreation van. That changes this year. On February 10, Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris joined Mayor John Stephens and Mayor Pro Tem Manuel Chavez for a groundbreaking on a full expansion, funded in part by a $1.2 million state earmark Petrie-Norris secured. The city awarded a $2,527,737 construction contract to Elegant Construction Inc., with design work by Architerra Design Group, to demolish the existing layout and rebuild it with new play equipment, shade shelters, picnic tables, expanded walking paths, and a footprint that grows into the adjacent parkway. Completion is targeted for late summer 2026.
Three unrelated park departments, three separate funding streams, three different neighborhoods. What ties them together is a citywide park assessment that surfaced earlier this year, and one statistic in particular that reframes all of it: according to the Trust for Public Land, 67 percent of Costa Mesa residents live within a ten-minute walk of a public park, but only 5 percent of the city's land is actually dedicated to park space. Compare that to Irvine, which devotes 28 percent of its land to parks and ranks second nationally on the Trust for Public Land's ParkScore index. Costa Mesa residents are close to parks. They just are not close to much park.
That gap is the quiet logic behind this year's construction wave. When commissioners reviewed the citywide playground and amenity assessment this spring, they found aging equipment and deferred maintenance across multiple sites, prompting one resident at a public meeting to frame the stakes plainly: the issue was not aesthetics, it was "child safety, equity and responsible public investment." A council that had been treating park upgrades as isolated capital requests started treating them as one overdue backlog, and the state and county earmarks that happened to be available this budget cycle got pointed at three different corners of the city at once. Ketchum-Libolt exists because Costa Mesa's Westside is short on green space and the state funding was there. The TeWinkle skate expansion exists because a park with 49 acres on paper still had a skate facility sized for a much smaller city. Lions Park's cafe exists because the county saw an opportunity to fund something residents would actually use daily, not just admire.
None of this means Costa Mesa is suddenly awash in new parkland. A cafe kiosk and a lake liner do not move the 5 percent figure. What they do is make the existing 5 percent work harder, which is a more honest description of what is happening than "park renovations," and explains why it feels like every corner of the city has fencing up in the same calendar year. It is not bad luck. It is one backlog, funded from three directions, landing at once.
For anyone trying to plan a weekend walk or figure out why a favorite path is suddenly rerouted, here is where each project stands:
If you live near one of these sites, the fencing is not permanent and it is not random. It is three overdue projects clearing the same backlog at the same time, which is a better problem than the alternative.
For more on how Costa Mesa's neighborhoods continue to change, reach out to Susie McKibben.
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