Plans for a traffic bridge at Costa Mesa’s Gisler Avenue may be nixed after 60+ years

The western terminus of Costa Mesa’s Gisler Avenue has for years remained untouched — an asphalt road segueing to a pedestrian bridge that spans the concrete channel of the Santa Ana River — and city leaders want it to stay that way.

But, since the first highway master plans for Orange County were inked in the 1950s, the site has been identified as a place where a potential roadway bridge could link Gisler to Garfield Avenue in Huntington Beach.

That juncture is one of four Santa Ana River crossings identified in the document — two more at Adams Street and Victoria Avenue have since been constructed, while a third connecting Huntington’s Banning Avenue and Costa Mesa’s 19th Street is also being contested but is currently on hold.

The plan for the bridge system likely made sense when Orange County’s population was booming and homes had not yet filled in the parcels along Gisler Avenue.

A bicyclist Thursday approaches the end of Costa Mesa’s Gisler Avenue, near the Mesa Verde Country Club golf course.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

But today, Costa Mesa’s “state streets” neighborhood and California Elementary School to the north and Mesa Verde Country Club to the south make building out the two-lane road a dicey proposition.

“In order to put a bridge up, hypothetically, you’d have to do a lot of eminent domain, including a school site, the Mesa Verde golf course and about 20 to 30 homes,” Mayor John Stephens said Thursday. “Obviously, nobody in Costa Mesa wants that. It would be brutal for the residents of Mesa Verde.”

For that reason, city leaders have fought since 1991 to have the Garfield-Gisler bridge removed from the Master Plan of Arterial Highways (MPAH), now under the jurisdiction of the Orange County Transportation Authority.

Joined in their effort by Huntington Beach, and later Fountain Valley, officials and residents alike have pushed the agency to conduct traffic studies and consider alternative infrastructure improvements that would negate the need for the bridges.

With the penning of a memorandum of understanding in 2006, the involved parties agreed to implement a series of improvements, including intersection upgrades, street widening and new freeway on-ramps. And, in the meantime, a few seismic changes to the surrounding area have worked out in the cities’ favor.

Orange County population forecasts have trended downward, from 3.6 million to 3.3 million, in the last two decades, while completion of OCTA’s $2.16-billion I-405 Improvement Project in 2023 increased the freeway’s capacity, lessening the need for arterial connectors.

A portion of Costa Mesa’s Gisler Avenue would possibly be destroyed, if the county were to enact a plan to connect the two-lane road with the four-lane Garfield Street, across the Santa Ana River, in Huntington Beach.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Those changes led the transportation agency to determine that the Garfield-Gisler bridge was no longer necessary.

“Based on the fact that forecast congestion has not increased in the study area reviewed in this analysis, there is no indication of a need for further in‐depth study of the MPAH status of the Garfield-Gisler [right of way] reserve,” a 2025 technical study concluded.

“It is recommended that the facility be fully removed from the MPAH without significant impacts on traffic or congestion in the area.”

Stephens and Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley, two longstanding opponents of the bridge proposal, serve on OCTA’s Board of Directors as well as a Regional Transportation and Planning Committee that reviews highway programs and makes recommendations to the agency’s board of directors.

A county plan to build a bridge from Gisler Avenue to Garfield Avenue in Huntington Beach, debated for decades, could soon be eliminated.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

On Monday, the committee formally recommended the project be stricken from the master plan. The move was highlighted in letters of support signed by the public works directors of the cities of Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley.

Fountain Valley, which had in previous decades historically supported the Santa Ana River traffic crossings, after Monday’s vote decided to withdraw its letter of support so the matter could be reviewed by its city council, according to Stephens.

Once a determination is made at that level, it will be up to the OCTA Board of Directors to decide whether to formally adopt the master plan amendment that would leave the Gisler Avenue terminus as it stands today.

Foley said Thursday she was hopeful for a positive outcome.

“We can’t exactly have a highway running through our nice residential communities — you’d be taking out schools, homes and beautiful open spaces, the golf course, etc.,” she said. “We’ve been working on this for many decades here in Costa Mesa, and it’s finally time to take this bad idea off the Master Plan of Arterial Highways.”