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Bombs Bursting in Air
Explosives fund school sports but lead to heated debate in CM

By Sara Ellis
OC Voice staff writer

 In the wake of strangled state budgets and the federal No Child Left Behind Act, public school sports equipment, band instruments and uniforms often must be paid for via the sale of magazines, program ads, bikini carwashes, and, ironically, fireworks—a “free market” funding scheme from which distributor companies such as TNT collect up to 80 percent of the proceeds.

In Costa Mesa, one of the five cities left in Orange County where the sale and use of so-called “safe and sane” fireworks remains legal, July 4th has become a contentious and conveniently malleable symbol, pitting pyromaniac youth vs. “cranky” seniors; big government vs. the youthful entrepreneur spirit; and, if one believes former mayor Sandi Genis, class against class.

In words suggestive of the Costa Mesa City Council majority’s infamous immigrant phobia, Genis warned attendees at the Aug. 7 city council meeting, where fireworks was on the agenda, that if fireworks sales continue, Costa Mesa will be exiling itself from “affluent communities like Irvine,” and joining up with “Garden Grove and Santa Ana.”

Even worse, Genis says, because of the sale of fireworks, “We have senior citizens who are prisoners in their homes now, who have groups coming from who knows where, who are occupying their front yards to do fireworks; and they’re terrified.” 

If that seems like hyperbole, the first-hand accounts of problems faced by Costa Mesa seniors due to fireworks, both legal and illegal, are frightening enough. Forty-year resident Mildred Nicholson, while not claiming to be a prisoner, loathes leaving home during July for fear of fire. “We can’t go off and leave our house because we don’t know what’s going to happen, and we can’t sit and read either,” she says.

The explosives are also a hassle for the city’s protective services, says Sgt. Brian Glass of the Costa Mesa Police Department. “It is a definite burden placed on our department and emergency services in general,” he told the OC Voice.

Lindsay Vanlaningham, Assistant Communications Director at the California Environmental Protection Agency, agrees that even in so-called safe urban areas, warmer temperatures may be turning fireworks into a danger akin to a lit match in a dynamite shed. Vanlaningham referring to a recent study which shows a rise in Lake Tahoe’s nighttime temperatures by an average of four degrees.

Despite Costa Mesa’s sunny statistics showing a recent drop in fireworks related incidents, as well as an overall loss in property damage for the county, Orange County Fire Marshall Stephen Miller states that the surrounding vegetation has proven to be a quick substitute to the once much-more-flammable human-made construction material.

“We’ve seen a reduction in fires due to construction and enforcement,” he says, adding that “We haven’t had a lot of structures lost to fireworks over the years because of public awareness, but we have had a lot of vegetation fires. It can happen in the most innocent area. One started on a hillside and raced up to the homes pretty quickly.”

Miller is referring to the recent brush fire in the Orange County Hills, caused not by the torch from a bottle rocket or cigarette end, but merely a warm and wayward car part. Before it was finished, the fire had blazed through nearly 100 acres of dry vegetation. Imagine what a stink bomb might do.

A two-pronged proposal from Councilmember Linda Dixon to put a fireworks ban on the February 2008 ballot—along with a 2 percent increase in the city’s transient occupancy tax (TOT)—might have meant disappointment for fireworks enthusiasts; but this proposal might also have rescued, by providing a more stable funding source, hopeful fundraisers from even worse letdowns in the future.

While Mansour, Bever, and Leece, who voted down Dixon’s proposal 3-2, argued that the city’s potential hotel guests would be forced to move “down the street,” a 2006 study session reveals that the hike would, as Dixon asserted, merely have placed Costa Mesa’s bed tax at 8 percent, the typical rate for California cities, while raising an extra $1,634,000 annually. Such revenue would certainly be far more dependable than dogged reliance on a fundraising method that with a warming climate and further restrictions seems doomed to yield smaller and smaller change.

Doug Bennett, the Director of the Orange Coast College Foundation, says the school’s men’s and women’s basketball teams saw a foretaste of such disappointment this year. “We netted about $7,000, but the last two years we did about $12,000,” a drop he attributes to the July 4th holiday landing on a Wednesday, as well as recent statewide bans on sparklers and ground flowers, brought on partially by dryer and hotter weather.

Fireworks may have once provided relatively harmless fun during the summer months, but this is no longer the case. It’s not just seniors who’ve gone crabby; the mercury is getting pretty hot under the collar these summer days as well. And if Costa Mesa youth groups continue to be forced to pay out-of-pocket for things that, like fireworks, were once givens, they’re also going to have to adapt their funding methods to a changing climate. Both the political climate in Sacramento and Washington D.C., as well as climate change in the air around us.

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Oct. 2007

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