Plan Stresses Amenities : Segerstrom Moves to Blunt Tower Criticism

As C. J. Segerstrom & Sons formally unveiled plans Monday for its last major office complex in Costa Mesa, company officials acknowledged that they hope the proposed day-care center, art gallery and acres of landscaped parkways will mute growing opposition to the project’s central feature: a 32-story office tower along the San Diego Freeway.

The tower, which would rise about 510 feet, would be more than twice the height of the county’s tallest existing building, the 222-foot Center Tower next to the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The proposed tower is the focus of South Coast Place, a nearly 100-acre project planned for the north side of the San Diego Freeway between Fairview Road and Harbor Boulevard and south of Sunflower Avenue--the last undeveloped section of the Segerstrom family’s once-sprawling farm holdings in Costa Mesa.

Features Hinge on Tower

Before officially presenting the project to the Costa Mesa City Council and Planning Commission Monday afternoon, Segerstrom officials said they hope that community leaders and residents realize that the project’s special features--a $700,000 day-care center for 120 children, an art gallery and about 75 acres of landscaped open space--are possible only if the 32-story tower is permitted.

“These are things that the 32-story building make possible,” a company spokesman said. “Without the tower, you can’t have them because you don’t have the economies and the open space to work with.”

Although Segerstrom officials said they expect the project to be approved within the next six weeks by the City Council, Councilman Dave Wheeler has already argued that the 32-story tower would be an eyesore for nearby residents. In addition, a member of the city’s planning department, which has yet to formally announce its position on the project, said Monday that planning officials, as well as community residents, are concerned about the height of the tower.

Change in Plans

The latest proposal, which the company initially filed last September, seeks to change development plans for the area that the City Council approved in mid-1984. The earlier plans call for a series of low-rise office buildings, two hotels, a shopping area and a single 25-story office tower, for a total of 3.5 million square feet.

The revised plans, which must receive council approval before construction can begin, call for five low-rise office buildings, a parking garage with ground-level shops and art gallery, one hotel, a restaurant, a shopping area and a child-care center for the preschool children of workers in the complex. The total number of developed square feet would be 3.2 million.

In their presentations to city officials and the media Monday, Segerstrom officials stressed that the revised plans contain fewer developed square feet, more open space and the special amenities.

In the revisions, the Segerstrom spokesman said, the company is trying “to respond to community concerns” over child care, open space and the arts, not presenting vehicles to make the 32-story tower more acceptable to residents. “You could call them sweeteners,” he said, “but I wouldn’t.”

Importance of Centers

If the project is approved and the day-care center built, Segerstrom would become one of the first developers in the state to offer a full-time child-care program as part of a new office complex.

The proposed day-care center also represents yet more evidence of the growing importance of day care in the office-construction business. Within the last six months, a handful of cities have taken steps to require developers to provide day-care opportunities in order to win building permits for their projects.

In Concord, a San Francisco suburb, developers are charged 0.5% of the value of their projects to finance day-care programs. San Francisco requires builders of major projects to either provide on-site child care or to pay $1 per square foot to a fund that finances such programs.

Closer to home, Yorba Linda earlier this month began studying a City Council member’s proposal to impose similar child-care fees for new building projects.

Segerstrom officials said that while Costa Mesa has no such laws, they feel that local employees and companies would appreciate the opportunity that a nearby day-care center offers. Under the current proposal, Segerstrom would pay the entire cost of constructing the building, with parents and office tenants sharing the cost of operating the center.