Foes of Expanding Newport Center Say They’ve Forced Vote

After several days of racing the clock, opponents of a $300-million Newport Center expansion plan claimed victory Tuesday night in their effort to collect 4,353 signatures needed to put the issue on a citywide ballot for a special election in Newport Beach.

Facing a deadline for filing the signatures with the city clerk of 5 p.m. today, a coalition of citizens groups called Gridlock circulated petitions until late Tuesday evening.

At 11 p.m., Gridlock organizer Alan Beek said 5,971 signatures had been counted.

“We’re home free,” Beek said.

Petitioners need the signatures of 10% of the city’s registered voters to qualify their issue as a ballot measure. That would be 4,353 signatures in this case.

If Tuesday night’s tally had failed to exceed the minimum number by 10%, Beek said, canvassers would have been out today gathering some last minute “safety margin” signatures, in case some of the signatures are declared invalid.

Earlier Tuesday, Beek had been only guardedly optimistic that Gridlock would reach its goal.

A citywide vote, expected to cost the city $60,000, would be held later this year or possibly early next year.

After an acrimonious public debate, the Newport Beach City Council voted 5 to 2 on July 14 to approve the Newport Center expansion plan. Then, in a special session last week, the council voted 6 to 1 against putting the vote sought by the Gridlock drive on the Nov. 4 general election ballot. That action, however, appeared to merely delay what may become one of the most spirited election contests in years between the city’s slow-growth forces and proponents of the expansion project.

The expansion plan, scaled down three times by the Irvine Co. since it first was proposed a decade ago, calls for several new office buildings, hundreds of new shops, town houses, cultural amenities and road improvements on 518 acres in and around the business and retail complex that includes Fashion Island.

Without a citywide vote, the expansion project seemed headed for a court fight. Terry Watt, a San Francisco-based attorney representing a group called Stop Polluting Our Newport (SPON), said early Tuesday that she might file a lawsuit claiming that the city’s environmental impact report on the project is inadequate.

She said SPON has until Thursday to challenge the environmental study in court under state law that requires such lawsuits to be filed within 30 days of a city council’s approval of the project.

Watt said she is awaiting the outcome of Tuesday night’s signature tally before advising SPON whether to proceed to court. She could not be reached for comment Tuesday night.

The decision to sue would have to be made before it is known how many of the signatures will be declared invalid. Most of the signatures declared invalid will be rejected because they do not match those on voter registration affidavits.

Although it is unlikely, the signature verification process could take up to 30 days, city and county officials said.

By 9 p.m. Tuesday, Jean Harrington’s Dover Shores home had become Gridlock’s informal headquarters. Volunteers were seated around both the kitchen and dining room tables tabulating signatures.

The doorbell rang about every 10 minutes as new arrivals stoped by to drop off petitions or help with the counting.

Betty Fellinge, who collected petitions from the group’s post office box Tuesday, said about 110 signatures had been mailed in.

Newport Beach Mayor Philip R. Maurer said earlier Tuesday he did not see the petition drive as a meaningful threat to the Irvine Co. plan.

“I just have a feeling they won’t make it,” Maurer said Tuesday afternoon. “But if they do, we’ll have to qualify them.”

Maurer said he is concerned about the expense of the special election.

It would “cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $60,000,” Maurer said. “And the people who wanted the thing--it doesn’t cost them a thing.”

If the group fails to gather the 4,353 valid signatures needed to put the expansion plan before the city electorate, it will be only the second time such a petition effort has fallen short of its goal in Newport Beach.

Earlier this summer, Newport 2000, a group of citizens pushing for a variety of traffic improvements in the city, failed in its attempt to meet a late June deadline to put an initiative on the November ballot.

That group has now gathered more than 6,000 signatures, according to Roger Vandergrift, its treasurer, and will try to put the measure before the voters in a special election.

Maurer said he objects to Gridlock’s method as much as its cause.

“So many times they say things that aren’t true,” Maurer said of the slow-growth activists.

But if the group is successful, Maurer said, the city and the coalition that supports the expansion plan--which Maurer describes as “having quite a list of very, very prominent people” among its ranks--will “just have to get out there and work. Put their money and mouths where they say they are.”

Architect William P. Ficker, who helped organize the 300-member Citizens for a Better Newport in direct opposition to Gridlock, said Tuesday that his group has received more than 30 contributions in the $10 to $100 range and expects a lot more in the coming weeks.

“We’ll be ready with the necessary energy and money to wage an effective battle at the polls,” Ficker said.

He cautioned against characterizing his group as a business-oriented, pro-Irvine Co. organization, saying that “we work in Newport, but we also live here, too, and we’re just as concerned as they (Gridlock members) are about what happens to our homes. We’re for the community.”