THE GOLDEN COMPROMISE : The 3 Irvines: a Sort of Family Whose Lately Reconciled Members May

Face a Different Set of Conflicts in Future

Sometimes people at the company must scratch their heads and ask: “Why did we create this city in the first place?” --Larry Agran, Irvine City Council member

For nearly two decades, the three Irvines--the company, the campus and the community--have functioned in a shifting, occasionally uneasy partnership.

Boosters use such terms as “symbiotic” and “synergistic”--which imply a mutually dependent relationship of equals--but in many ways the dynamic is more like that of a family, especially considering that the creation of the City of Irvine and at least the location of UC Irvine were functions of the sprawling Irvine Ranch.

The parent company, which has experienced its own upheavals during its 20-year transition from the Irvine family’s Irvine Ranch to Donald Bren’s Irvine Co., has watched its two offspring pass through stages when they seemed like awkward infants, ungrateful children, unruly adolescents and, finally, reconciled young adults.

To UCI’s new chancellor, Jack Peltason, who served an earlier tenure at UCI as vice chancellor to Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. from 1964 to 1967, the family analogy is an apt one. “The teen-ager and the child, you can recognize them,” he said of UCI’s periods of development.

Yet the city, the company and the university still have major goals and priorities that may be in conflict, despite their recent reconciliation. Because the leadership of each entity responds to a radically different constituency, and because of the complex legal relationship among them, there has always been the potential for protracted, messy struggles.

Just as there would have been no City of Irvine if the Irvine Ranch had not decided to create a “new town” in the early 1960s on some of its vast Orange County acreage, UCI would not be where it is had not the Irvine Ranch lobbied heavily, donating 1,000 acres to the University of California system and selling an additional 500 acres at a reduced rate.

From the beginning, location of a major university with a projected enrollment of 27,500 students was a key element in developing and marketing the Irvine Co.’s new city that was once expected to grow to 300,000 people.

But it has not always been sweetness and light among the trio. When UCI erupted with student protests in 1969, for example, the company and the nascent community recoiled, and UCI disappeared for a while from the Irvine Co.’s promotional literature. Plans for locating City Hall across the street from the campus were shelved.

The Irvine Co., meanwhile, has to contend constantly with what City Councilman Larry Agran calls an “ambient level of suspicion toward a monopoly landlord” among Irvine residents. It generally does so by maintaining a low profile, avoiding intrusions into city affairs.

“The Irvine Co. has a long tradition of avoiding conflict,” said former Mayor Gabrielle Pryor, reaching back to the days when it was a family-controlled concern headed by Ray Watson. “The goal is not important,” she said. “The process is important.”

From time to time, however, the company has become involved. An effort early this year by Fluor Corp., one of the city’s largest employers, together with Texas builder Trammell Crow, to develop land at Fluor’s headquarters along the San Diego Freeway--directly across the freeway from the Irvine Co.’s new Hilton hotel--was temporarily blocked by the City Council following heavy company lobbying.

There have been other conflicts, such as the location of the community’s hospital, and future ones may lie ahead.

The Irvine Co., for example, hopes to develop for residential and commercial use a large block of unincorporated land it owns overlooking the coast between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, next to Crystal Cove State Park. A key to that development is construction of the proposed San Joaquin freeway, for which some form of cooperation with the City of Irvine appears necessary.

Annexation Question

From a revenue-generating point of view, it would be advantageous for the land-locked City of Irvine to annex this area, which is bound to be upscale and revenue-generating as a tax base. But under California law the Irvine Co. has the right to decide which, if any, of the adjoining municipalities is asked to annex the as yet uninhabited land. Significant resistance on the part of Irvine citizens to the San Joaquin and Foothill freeways could cause the company to look elsewhere for a partner. One residents’ group, the Committee of Seven Thousand, has been active in attempting to block the freeways, at the polls and in the courts.

Also, UCI is considered cash-poor by University of California standards, with no independent endowment and only four endowed chairs, but land-rich. It would like to develop commercially its 500 acres of “inclusionary land” as a biotechnology park, a venture some believe could generate millions of dollars each year. The commercial value of the inclusionary land would be enhanced considerably by construction of the San Joaquin freeway, according to John Miltner, UCI’s vice chancellor for university advancement. “All signs are that (the freeway) is rather important to our interests,” he said, acknowledging that a number of UCI faculty members have been prominent in efforts to stop the freeway.

Veto Power

Under the initial agreement that ceded this land to UCI, the Irvine Co. has the right to veto any non-educational use of the 500 acres, and the university retains reciprocal veto power over 150 acres next to the campus still owned by the Irvine Co.

The Irvine Co., meanwhile, is investing heavily in a biotechnology park of its own, called the Spectrum project, at the juncture of the San Diego and Santa Ana freeways, nine miles away. The planned Irvine Medical Center (IMC) was once promoted as the centerpiece of Irvine Spectrum, although Gary Hunt, company vice president, now says, “I don’t view the hospital as the ‘anchor’ (for Spectrum).”

But in an interview, Irvine Co. President Thomas H. Nielsen acknowledged that a “competitive element” may exist between the two areas, observing that site selection by biotechnology firms will be “a matter of choice that people will have to make.” He is not worried, he said, because in Irvine, “land is a very limited resource.”