Stakes Raised in Decade-Old Newport Beach Expansion Battle

The Irvine Co.’s planned $300-million expansion of Newport Center has aroused the passions of slow-growth advocates and supporters of the project so much that both sides are preparing for a bitter and costly election fight.

The issue and the combatants are not new. But this time the outcome could affect not only thousands of people who live and work outside Newport Center but the future of a large area of open space owned by the Irvine Co. beyond the Newport Beach city limits.

Newport Beach City Councilwoman Evelyn R. Hart summed up the feelings expressed by several people in the debate when she said it involves competing images of Newport Beach: bedroom or board room.

For more than a decade Newport Center has come to symbolize the struggle between these different visions.

“The Irvine Co. is threatening to destroy what little remains of this city’s village atmosphere,” Suzy Ficker, an opponent of expansion, said last week. “We don’t need more office workers and homes to bring more traffic on our streets, which are already clogged beyond what we should have to endure.

“If people want to live and work in Newport Beach, let them come down here and buy the unsold stock of existing homes and commercial property.”

But Ficker’s brother, William, an architect with Newport Center offices, strongly disagreed.

“If we plan wisely,” he said, “we can grow and still keep the kind of life style we moved here for. The latest compromise worked out between the city and the Irvine Co. represents the best opportunity to achieve both goals. And people have to realize that Newport Beach will grow whether we like it or not.”

Both Fickers have lived in Newport Beach 25 years.

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 Fashion Island complex.

Already, the Irvine Co. and Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. maintain their corporate headquarters there, as do several smaller firms. Major banks, law firms, real estate and securities brokerages, advertising firms, restaurants and the Newport Harbor Art Museum are located there, as are the offices of Rep. Robert E. Badham and state Sen. Marian Bergeson, both Newport Beach Republicans. Retail stores include the Broadway, Robinson’s, Buffums, and Neiman-Marcus, and the center’s southern skyline is dominated by the Newport Marriott Hotel.

Gridlock, a coalition of groups opposed to the expansion plans, has circulated a flyer proclaiming that the project means “46,000 more cars per day, high density, 5,300 new employees, traffic like South Coast Plaza.”

The Irvine Co. has countered with a slick, eight-page brochure featuring pen-and-ink artist’s renderings depicting what it calls “The Town Center of Newport Beach. . . . A plan for the future. . . . For today, for tomorrow.”

The literature and the rhetoric signal a major political fight, but they’re also relics of previous battles. The players and the arguments they employ have not changed nearly as much as the once sleepy vacation spot.

In the late 1970s, slow-growth advocates took control of the Newport Beach City Council and began rejecting major new business and residential projects.

In 1980, the Irvine Co. and the Koll Co. successfully targeted two council incumbents for defeat. They spent thousands of dollars on newspaper ads and slick campaign brochures.

In 1981, opponents of an earlier Irvine Co. plan for expanding Newport Center qualified a citywide referendum for the ballot. The Irvine Co. withdrew the proposal because surveys showed immense voter hostility toward the company on an unrelated issue: The firm’s handling of expired leases affecting more than 4,000 houses purchased by residents decades ago on land still owned by the company.

In November, 1982, development forces struck again, defeating Proposition N, a referendum that would have blocked a 75-acre residential, commercial and industrial complex in the western part of the city on Banning Ranch, a former sheep ranch and oil field. The developer, Beeco Ltd., and other businesses--some from as far away as San Francisco--financed a campaign that defeated not only the ballot measure but also slow-growth Councilman Paul Hummel.

This spring, Newport 2000, a political action committee, began promoting slow-growth advocates for the City Council ballot in November. This and other groups, including SPON (Stop Polluting Our Newport) also started a petition drive to qualify a ballot measure that would permit growth only where it could be shown that streets are adequate to handle increased traffic. Signatures are still being collected to qualify the measure for a special election.

Gridlock began a separate petition drive last month to overturn the City Council’s 5-2 vote approving the Irvine Co.’s scaled-down Newport Center expansion plan.

Last Wednesday, Gridlock leader Allan Beek submitted more than 6,000 signatures on petitions calling for a special election on the expansion. If the registrar of voters certifies 4,543 of those signatures as those of registered voters in Newport Beach, the issue will be headed for a citywide vote.

The slow-growth advocates who were active in the 1970s and early 1980s have within their ranks many of the same people who for years have fought expansion of John Wayne Airport, as well as tall office buildings and hotel projects.

And some of their opponents, led by architect William Ficker, are veterans of the same battles.

“The names change a little, but generally we all know each other from past efforts,” Ficker said. “I don’t know anybody in the city who has not been involved in these election battles over the years.”

“It’s a moving craps game,” said Hummel, the slow-growth councilman defeated in 1982.

Ficker, a world-renowned yachtsman, has helped organize Citizens for a Better Newport in direct opposition to Gridlock. He acknowledges that he took the group’s name from a 1982 organization that had essentially the same members as the current one.

But Ficker denied that the Irvine Co. was responsible for either of them. And he is insulted by any suggestion that he and his allies are staunchly pro-Irvine Co.

Ficker, whose architectural firm helped plan the Tustin and Irvine auto malls for the Irvine Co., said: “I’ve probably paid more than $1 million to the Irvine Co. in rent for my offices. The company is my landlord. How many people do you know who willingly go out of their way to do something for a landlord?”

Among the pieces of the Newport Center expansion plan that could significantly affect the future of development in Orange County is a proposed thoroughfare through Irvine Co.-owned open space known as Pelican Hill Road.

Just a ridgeline now, the proposed seven-mile road would meander from Coast Highway near Crystal Cove north through coastal hills dotted with scrub brush. It would then curve west, supplanting the existing Bonita Canyon Drive south of UC Irvine, from the entrance of the Coyote Hills landfill to the intersection of Bonita Canyon Drive and MacArthur Boulevard.

Traffic engineers for Newport Beach and the Irvine Co. argue that the proposed road will divert 30% of the vehicles passing through Newport Center.

Now, Laguna Canyon Road and MacArthur Boulevard are the only routes south that coastal residents can take to get to John Wayne Airport, its surrounding office complexes and other destinations farther inland. Traffic engineers say Pelican Hill Road would allow such traffic to bypass Corona del Mar and Newport Center entirely.

What’s more, south coastal residents commuting to Newport Center would be able to take Pelican Hill Road to a planned extension of San Joaquin Hills Road, Newport Center’s northern access point.

Gridlock members argue that Pelican Hill Road would represent a longer, more circuitous trip for most people, so there would be little incentive for them to avoid traveling directly up Coast Highway to MacArthur Boulevard.

As a condition of the Newport Beach council’s approval of the Newport Center expansion, the Irvine Co. agreed to build both the San Joaquin Hills Road extension and Pelican Hill Road ahead of the company’s development schedule. That is expected to cost the Irvine Co. about $20 million.

Councilwoman Evelyn R. Hart, who says she voted against the expansion project only out of fear that transportation improvements would not be ready on time, contends that the issue underlying the current dispute is one of competing visions of Newport Beach, which she summed up as “bedroom versus board room.”

“Yes, there are people who want to have both,” Hart added. “I think I’ve been one who thinks we can have both, but you can fool yourself sometimes. When we established the visitors and convention bureau, I asked myself whether I really wanted my city to become a convention city.

“I debated with myself for a long time. I decided that I don’t like the idea of Newport becoming a convention city. But then I tell myself that maybe it already has become one without me realizing it. What was I doing when I was voting to allow all those new hotel rooms in the city in recent years? Maybe it was happening then.”

The role that Pelican Hill Road may play in such conflicting visions of Newport Beach goes far beyond the city boundaries.

Critics of Newport Center expansion argue that the road would primarily serve Irvine Co. developments outside the city, especially the proposed 9,400-acre Irvine Coast development between Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach.

The Irvine Co. originally planned major office, residential and hotel complexes along the 2.5 miles of scenic coastline. But two years ago it submitted a less ambitious plan to the Board of Supervisors--one that eliminates most of the offices, reduces the number of residential units to about 2,000, including condominiums, and calls mainly for resort-style hotels and golf courses.

An environmental group called Friends of the Irvine Coast had challenged the company’s earlier plan in court, but the lawsuit has been in limbo while the revised plan makes its way through various state and county agencies. The property is in unincorporated territory, regulated by the Board of Supervisors and the California Coastal Commission.

In addition to the Irvine Coast project, the Irvine Co. eventually hopes to open up the hills between UC Irvine and the coast to housing development. The county’s general plan designates much of that area as “urban,” but the company has not yet submitted a specific land-use plan. No steps toward housing construction are contemplated in the near future, except along the coast.

Still, Irvine Councilman Dave Baker and other Irvine politicians want the city to annex the unincorporated land.

“I think it’s part of Irvine’s destiny to be a coastal city,” Baker said last week.

Baker said Irvine would benefit from controlling the land because of the increased tax base it would provide, and because the city could then control development along Pelican Hill Road, the only artery that is being planned to traverse the area.

The land is unpopulated and owned by the Irvine Co., so it cannot be annexed by any city without the company’s permission.

Moreover, Newport Beach also wants to annex the area and has already installed utilities and laid out street patterns for the coastal portion.

The county’s Local Agency Formation Commission, which oversees annexations, has placed most of the area in Newport Beach’s so-called “sphere of influence.”

The commission is scheduled to review the issue this year.

Baker met with Hart twice last year to discuss annexation.

“He asked me if there were any areas around Irvine that I might be interested in annexing to Newport Beach, as if we might be able to work out some kind of trade,” Hart recalled. “I just don’t see that going anywhere.”

Hart said Newport Beach would never let Irvine swallow up the area along the Irvine Coast and along Pelican Hill Road.

“We’re ready to make our stand,” Hart said.

She pointed out that Newport Beach police and a department helicopter patrol the area, informally. Just as if Pelican Hill Road were there.