Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : EDUCATION : Chapman College Threatens to Move in Building Dispute

A dispute between residents of the Old Towne area of Orange and 125-year-old Chapman College has escalated over the height and location of a proposed $10-million classroom building on the edge of the campus.

G.T. (Buck) Smith, president of the private institution, has threatened to move the four-year college out of the city if the matter cannot be resolved.

“We have other communities that are interested in having a first-rate college with a national reputation in their community,” Smith said. “We’d like to be in Orange, but if it interferes with our viability as a high-quality college, then we many have to go somewhere else.”

An independently owned college affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Chapman has 2,100 students. It was founded in Woodland in 1861 and moved to Los Angeles around the turn of the century. In 1954, the college moved to Orange.

Old Towne, which borders on the campus, is an area of early-1900 homes, and some residents have charged that construction of the proposed four-story Learning Center would detract from the area’s character, as well as increasing traffic congestion.

The college has incorporated plans for increased parking in the area, Smith said, at a cost of nearly $1 million.

“We are not anti-development,” said Debbie McLaughlin, a committee chairman for the 300-household Old Towne Preservation Assn. “But there are proper places for high-rise buildings, and this isn’t one of them. In the wintertime, some of our residents would be blocked from the sun by 3:30 p.m., and that means turning on the lights and the heat that much earlier.”

Smith countered that an existing science building is the same height as the Learning Center.

On Oct. 6, the Orange Planning Commission, which had approved the college’s environmental impact report for the new building on Sept. 3, unexpectedly reversed itself and blocked the proposal.