Editorial:

Thursday should be a day of reckoning for the Orange County Fairgrounds. State officials are expected then to unseal bids on the 150-acre property in Costa Mesa. As of last week, the opening of the initial offerings, followed by a live auction, was scheduled to take place at the fairgrounds at 10 a.m. Jan. 14. But the deadline for submitting those bids was extended from 5 p.m. Friday to the same hour Monday.

Whenever the bids are opened, the event surely will draw a crowd of packed house, mostly of Costa Mesans outraged at the prospect that this source of local pride for decades could be put on the auction block. They have every reason to be angry and worried that the land could be sold to a private profiteer or outsider, who has no sentimental attachment to their local jewel and might have other plans in store for it.

Although Costa Mesa officials couldn’t persuade Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to change his mind and cancel the sale — despite last week’s valiant last-ditch mission to Sacramento to plead their case to him in person — the prospect of a developer acquiring the fairgrounds and fundamentally changing the land’s use still is a long way off. Several obstacles litter that path.

For one, we’ll find out soon whether the city, through a joint bid with Orange County on the fairgrounds, will come out with the highest offer. But if the city and county lose out on the bidding, there’s at least one other safeguard in place, as well as measures that Costa Mesa is working on, to preserve the fairgrounds mainly for use as a fair and event center.

More specifically, because the fairgrounds lies in Costa Mesa’s jurisdiction, the city controls its zoning. Any effort by the new property owner to alter the land use would have to go through the City Council for clearance. Among other measures, the city also has been working on a plan to lock in the property’s current land use. As a last resort, the council will decide by Feb. 16 whether to place the issue of the fairgrounds’ land use on the June ballot.

We commend the all-out efforts of city officials to try and block the sale and preserve the property as a fairground. But, if all else fails, and a developer acquires the land, we hope that this person will work with city officials and the county to find some way that’s suitable to all to save those 150 acres from being transformed into just another Orange County housing tract or patch of Southland suburban sprawl.