Year after year, the historic Orange Plaza Park Circle keeps getting pummeled by reckless drivers often leaving a city teetering on the brink of bankruptcy footing the bill for repairs.
Now, Orange City officials are directing staff to bring back safety measures and potential traffic modifications to better protect the city’s iconic fountain from night time car wrecks in Old Towne Orange – a part of the city that has been the setting for many Hollywood film scenes.
City Councilwoman Kathy Tavoularis said at Tuesday’s meeting that it’s time they got serious about safeguarding a city landmark.
“We need to start being serious about protecting the historical value of the fountain and understanding that no matter what we do, there’s going to be a cost,” she said.
A fountain has been in that circle since 1887 – a year before the city was incorporated. The current one was installed 50 years later, according to Preserve Orange County.
At Tuesday’s meeting, city staff presented a host of ideas to help prevent cars wrecking the circle including putting up additional bollards, setting up boulders, installing rumble strips, closing the roundabout to vehicle traffic at night and putting up a raised median island.
But officials pushed back on a lot of those ideas and called for staff to bring back the trajectory of previous crashes into the circle and other data about the crashes.
Tavoularis said most of the accidents happened because people are drunk and worried that installing boulders would leave the city open to liability and bollards wouldn’t be an effective deterrent.
“The problem I have with all of these is that we cannot change behavior,” she said.
“I just don’t see how the other options are going to stop a potential drunk or inebriated driver from driving 80 miles an hour down Chapman or Glassell and being oh oops.”
Councilwoman Arianna Barrios, who represents the district that encompasses the circle, said there have been 44 crashes into the circle since 2018 and said a better understanding of how and where the cars are crashing can help inform their decision on a solution.
“I still would much rather prefer to see a trajectory of at least the last 10 accidents, so that we would have a little bit better understanding of placement and where things would go,” she said at the meeting.
City Councilman Jon Dumitru agreed with Barrios and said closing down the roundabout was not viable and the sound from the rumble strips would be loud and bother residents in Old Towne.
“I think that that pushes all that traffic in the residential neighborhoods, which actually may even create a bigger safety issue,” he said.
Dumitru also said bollards were the best idea.
“An increase in the number of them around the plaza, is probably the most feasible and probably the quickest to enact with safety,” he said.
Councilman Denis Bilodeau worried that more bollards would lead to more deadly accidents.
“We’re talking about human lives, and bollards kill people – so I think we have to be mindful of that. We’re not trying to kill motorists. Just want them to make a right turn,” he said.
Mayor Dan Slater said bollards may be the only thing that works.
“The only way it seems to me to stop them, as suggested, is more bollards,” he said. “We just need more of them.”
“When you’re impaired driver and you’re going 60 miles an hour,” Slater added. “Something needs to stop you, because otherwise someone’s going to get killed. We’re so fortunate it hasn’t happened yet.”
Slater successfully motioned to direct staff to do more research on the safety measures and run suggestions by the city’s traffic commission.
In the meantime, the city will be putting reflective lights on the curb at the suggestion of Dumitru.
Orange Circle Keeps Getting Wrecked
In September 2022, officials agreed to spend over $300,000 to install 16 crash-rated bollards near the start of the pedestrian walkways leading to the plaza park circle and make lighting upgrades.
Months later a car plowed through the circle and destroyed the fountain – in an accident that Barrios has repeatedly described as a Dukes of Hazzard type crash.
After the crash, Orange County Supervisors gave the city $225,000 to help pay for the repairs – a majority of which came from Supervisor Don Wagner’s discretionary fund, as reported by the OC Register in 2023.
The fountain was fully restored and reopened in Spring of 2024.
Months later, the fountain was hit again and police discovered nitrous oxygen in the car. Since then many cities have been trying to crack down on the recreational use of the gas.
Tuesday’s discussion comes about a month since the latest accident in the circle when a suspected drunk driver drove through the roundabout and scraped the fountain.
A couple of residents called on officials to protect human life amid the frequent crashes.
Doug Redding, a city traffic commissioner, said an accident in the circle is guaranteed to happen again and supported the idea of a raised median to slow drivers down.
“We all agree that the chance of this happening again is 100% the chance of changing the human condition is 0%,” he said at the meeting.
“I know there’s a cost concern, but we have lives to protect, so I think it would be prudent for us to do something about it.”
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.