Costa Mesa celebrates a field of dreams

COSTA MESA — In a corner of the community room at the Los Angeles Times Orange County building Monday evening sat a large, rectangular cake bearing a message in frosting: “Happy birthday Jim Scott — Thank you for your passion for the youth of Costa Mesa.”

As the evening’s festivities made clear, it was a passion shared by many.

Scott’s nonprofit organization, Costa Mesa United, threw a party to celebrate the coming groundbreaking of a stadium at Estancia High School. The guest list read like a roll call of movers and shakers around Costa Mesa. Among those in attendance were school Supt. Jeffrey Hubbard, Chamber of Commerce President Ed Fawcett, former Mayor Mary Hornbuckle, city councilwomen, school board members, Estancia administrators and dozens more.

“There are pioneers and there are settlers, and we’re kind of the pioneers,” said Jim Scott Jr., who attended the ceremony with his father and delivered brief remarks at the podium.

The elder Scott spent the evening in a wheelchair, recovering from a stroke that he suffered in April. He said nothing throughout the hour-long celebration, but in his Estancia football jersey with his pants rolled up above his knees, he hardly looked like a patient. He turned 81 on Monday, and his family said that despite his health, his mind was as sharp as ever.

He had another reason to celebrate: When the Newport-Mesa Unified School District starts work on the stadium, paid for under the Measure F school bond, it will realize a long-held dream.

The first shovels are expected to start turning dirt on Feb. 15 — just over a decade after Scott and a group of fellow parents began lobbying for more high school sports facilities in Costa Mesa.

“This is such an exciting time, an exciting milestone for our city,” said City Councilwoman and Costa Mesa United member Katrina Foley.

Scott, whose youngest child graduated from Estancia in 1981, rounded up parents in the mid-1990s to lobby the district for new Costa Mesa athletic facilities.

The group went on to form the Costa Mesa Athletic Foundation, with the nonprofit Costa Mesa United as its fundraising arm.

In 2002, Costa Mesa United began hosting events to raise money for the stadium and an Olympic-sized pool at Costa Mesa High School. With construction costs steadily rising, however, the group fell far short of its fundraising goal. It took Measure F, the $282-million school bond that voters approved in November 2005, to bring the dream to fruition.

With Costa Mesa United having raised around $4 million in cash and pledges, the group plans to devote itself to other youth sports around town. Foley said she had organized a Youth Sports Council, which meets once a month and includes representatives from leagues around town, as well as the city and school district.

“We’ve asked all the youth groups to put together a wish list,” she said.