City Council Deals Harbor Square Plans Another Setback

Rejecting the latest plans for a hotel, restaurant and office complex on the parking lots flanking the harborfront County Administration Center, the San Diego City Council on Tuesday sent the proposal back to county supervisors to be modified and possibly abandoned.

In a rare simultaneous session with the supervisors, the council voted unanimously to return the proposal to the county rather than do what a majority of the council clearly would have preferred: kill it.

Questioning the height of the proposed buildings, their bulk and their presence on land now designated as a public park, the council members each listed what bothered them most about the proposed Harbor Square development. But when they had finished, the supervisors complained that it would be impossible to satisfy the concerns of the entire council, and almost as difficult to win the support of a majority.

“Frankly, if I were the developer, I’d tell you to go to hell,” Supervisor George Bailey said, questioning whether the council was sincere in its commitment to work with the county. “If we are just being exercised, I want the council to tell us.”

“It’s frustrating,” Supervisor Leon Williams said after the meeting. “We don’t know what to do.”

But Mayor Roger Hedgecock assured county officials that the city would devise a way for the two government bodies to work together so that the county and the developer would not return with another proposal only to be rejected again by the council.

That approach was received skeptically by a representative of the developer, who declined to comment in detail about the future of Harbor Square until the project’s financial backers could be consulted.

“We’re certainly disappointed,” said Robert Rosenthal, vice president of ZRD Development Inc., one of the partners in the project. Asked if he thought the project would ever be approved, Rosenthal said, “At some point, you have to know when the game is over.”

Tuesday’s council action was the latest in a series of setbacks for the Harbor Square project since the county decided in 1981, at the urging of then-Supervisor Hedgecock, to lease the parking lots to a private developer as a source of revenue for county programs.

Originally designed to include as its centerpiece a 1,000-room Marriott hotel, the project was redesigned after Marriott Corp. withdrew in December, 1983. The plan rejected by the council Tuesday called for a 400-room hotel, 600,000 square feet of restaurants and shops, and two office buildings intended to become a world trade center.

Rosenthal and retired Navy Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, another partner, argued that their proposal is a “visually and economically balanced project” that would provide an open, parklike setting where now only parking lots exist.

“It offers an integrated mix of uses that will attract tourists and San Diegans alike,” Zumwalt said. “It will create a major downtown park in San Diego.”

But the argument that landscaping and plazas between the hotel, the offices and the existing county building could be considered a public park was criticized by Supervisor Susan Golding, the only member of the board to oppose Harbor Square.

“I think you have to say it’s stretching it to say the hotel is for public use,” Golding said. “I think you have to say it’s stretching it to say the two office buildings are for public use. I think a landscaped lawn in front of a hotel is not what most people call a park. I don’t think you’ll find children playing ball in front of the hotel.”

The council was given land-use control over the property in a 1982 agreement with the county as part of a solution to a dispute over the parcel’s ownership.

City Councilman Bill Cleator said nostalgia played a role in his opposition to the project, because he watched as workers built the County Administration Center almost 50 years ago.

“I really have a problem with what you’ve piled on to this piece of property,” Cleator told the developer. “I just don’t think this is the time to go forth with this type of project.”

Added Councilman Mike Gotch, “This proposal in my mind falls short of expectations. It lacks vision. And one really must ask oneself: Is there no site anywhere not threatened, not compromised by shortsighted overdevelopment?”