City Rejects Ballot Spot for Expansion of Newport Center

The Newport Beach City Council voted 6 to 1 Thursday against placing a referendum on the controversial, $300-million expansion plan for Newport Center on the November ballot.

However, the council’s action--at a special noon meeting--merely delayed an expected citywide vote on the Newport Center expansion. That is because Gridlock, a citizens’ group opposed to the project, is expected to qualify a ballot measure for a special election. Such a vote would be held late this year or possibly early next year, city officials said.

Also on Thursday, a new 261-member group called Citizens for a Better Newport announced that it will raise money and campaign in support of the Newport Center expansion plan. With two well-heeled groups fighting over the expansion, the battle may become the most spirited in a series of recent contests in Orange County between slow-growth advocates and development proponents.

Scaled Down 3 Times

The expansion plan, scaled down three times by the Irvine Co. since the early 1970s, calls for several new office buildings, hundreds of new shops, town homes, cultural amenities and road improvements on 518 acres in and around the posh business and retail complex that includes Fashion Island.

In casting the dissenting vote Thursday, Councilman Donald A. Strauss said that the Newport Center project is important enough to put before the voters even without a referendum petition. But Council members Evelyn Hart, John C. Cox Jr., William Agee, Ruthelyn Plummer, Jackie Heather and Mayor Philip Maurer said that an election might negate months of public hearings and community involvement in preparing the expansion plan.

The council approved the Newport Center project 5 to 2 three weeks ago, with Strauss and Hart dissenting.

The council majority said Thursday that its decision was based on a feeling that the City Council reached an appropriate, justifiable conclusion in its recent approval of the Newport Center project and that referendum efforts, as Maurer put it, should take “their natural course.”

City officials said a special election would cost the city $60,000 more than if balloting was consolidated with a regularly scheduled election.

Although the mayor called the special session after saying he was concerned about the extra cost of a special ballot, he voted against consolidating the vote with the regularly scheduled Nov. 4 election.

38 Appear in Chambers

Thursday’s debate over the timing of a citywide vote drew 38 people to the council chambers, including Irvine Co. President Thomas H. Nielsen and Vice President Monica Florian, who opposed putting the issue on the Nov. 4 ballot. Only four other persons spoke.

Citizens for a Better Newport’s membership list includes some of the city’s most influential business and political figures. Distributed by architect William P. Ficker, the list includes such names as automobile dealer Roy Carver III, Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. Chairman Walter B. Gerken, developers Bill and Harriet Harris, former newspaper society columnist Mary Lou Hopkins-Hornsby, AirCal owner William Lyon, former state official Dana Reed, Mrs. James Roosevelt, Fluor Corp. President David S. Tappan Jr. and Supervisor Thomas F. Riley. Several, such as Ficker, have businesses in Newport Center.

Some of Newport Beach’s wealthy elite can be counted among Gridlock’s supporters, but they are mostly individual homeowners concerned about traffic congestion and pollution in their neighborhoods. Among them are computer engineer Allan Beek, whose family owns the Balboa Ferry, and activists such as Jean Watt of Stop Polluting Our Newport (SPON).

Thursday was the council’s last day to place a proposition on the Nov. 4 ballot. Gridlock has until Wednesday to collect 4,300 signatures for a special election.

Election timing could influence the results, according to political observers. Generally, special elections draw less than 30% of the eligible voters and tend to favor well-financed campaigns favoring conservative, pro-business causes. But such votes also tend to reflect anti-government sentiment, and in this case the Newport council could feel such wrath. Moreover, the debate over growth issues crosses traditional philosophical boundaries, making for odd political alliances between environmentalists and their former opponents who want to isolate their own homes as much as possible from urban encroachment.

Feelings are so intense in Newport Beach that the Newport Center expansion controversy has split families.

Before Thursday’s council vote, for example, architect Ficker told the council that Citizens for a Better Newport “is prepared for a full effort” to defeat expansion opponents at the polls. Ficker is a world-renowned sailor who skippered the Intrepid during a successful defense of the America’s Cup in 1970.

‘Irvine Co.’s Tokyo Rose’

But his sister, Suzy Ficker of Newport Beach, countered that she would fight the expansion project just as strongly, and told the council that there is “growing contempt of the Irvine Co. for its abuse of the power it has in this community.” After the meeting, she described her brother as “the Irvine Co.’s Tokyo Rose.”

“We’ve never seen eye to eye,” William Ficker said of his relationship with his sister.