School Site Project : Brea Council to Act Today on Complex

Brea Mayor Clarice Blamer remembers cruising past cows grazing on land adjacent to the Brea-Olinda High School--across from the Brea Mall and Civic Center--and thinking what expensive pasture that was.

Because the land just became too valuable to use for a student agriculture project, the Brea-Olinda Unified School District--which owns the site--decided to lease the land for development, raze the current school and use the money to build a new high school.

Today, city officials are scheduled to give their initial nod to development on the school property itself: eight new office buildings with up to 792,000 square feet of office space, six smaller restaurant and retail buildings with 34,000 square feet and an eight-screen multiplex cinema on the 39-acre Brea-Olinda High School site.

Meanwhile, city officials are wrapping up “the final details” to begin construction of the city’s first hotel, which will be constructed on the parking lot of the Brea Mall, which also will be expanded. The hotel will be geared toward business executives.

“A Little Parochial’

With the Brea Mall as its anchor, the 93-acre area could become a scaled-down version of Century City, “but it will still have a flavor of Orange County, which is a little parochial and not highly urbanized,” Blamer said.

Proposed by Lowe Brea Co., the development on the high school site is up for conceptual approval today with most of the plans subject to final city approval at a later date.

In the Brea Place proposal to be considered tonight, an alternate plan calls for a hotel instead of some of the office buildings. If the alternate plan is approved, the hotel would not be built before 1991, Development Services Director William R. Kelly said.

Adjacent to the school site, on what was once the cow pasture, a six-story building is nearing its January completion date, when Travelers Insurance will occupy it, City Planner James DeStefano said.

Scheduled for ground breaking in February on the Brea Mall parking lot is a 10-story, 200-room first-class hotel geared specifically for business people. Brea, home to approximately 10 international corporations and 20 national companies, has an untapped hotel market of visiting and temporary business people, City Manager Ed Wohlenberg said.

The hotel, a Crown Plaza Hotel by the Holiday Inn chain, will be built and operated by Brea Inn Associates, a partnership between McFaddin Ventures of Houston and Stan Gribble & Associates of Newport Beach.

The Brea Foundation, a quasi-public agency which owns and leased the property, will receive 3% from room rentals and 1% from food and beverage sales.

“As the hotel prospers, so does the foundation,” Wohlenberg said. And so does the city, since 80% of the foundation’s earnings will go directly back to Brea’s coffers for specific recreation and cultural programs, he said. The city also will receive about $500,000 a year from an 8% room tax beginning in five to eight years, in addition to sales tax revenues, he continued.

With money raised by leasing the land, the school district plans to build a new high school, complete with a swimming pool, football stadium, baseball field, tennis courts, auditorium and two gymnasiums. Current plans call for the new $20-million to $25-million school to be built on a 50-acre lot east of the Orange Freeway and north of Lambert Road.