VOTE CLOUDS FUTURE OF ART MUSEUM

In the wake of Tuesday’s referendum vote against the Irvine Co.’s overall expansion for Newport Center, Newport Harbor Art Museum officials say they are faced with crucial delays in the museum’s own development.

“It (the vote result), of course, is a great disappointment,” said museum director Kevin Consey Wednesday. “Right now, it’s too early to tell what we can do--except to say it means going back to the drawing boards.”

Consey said museum board leaders will meet in early December to determine “what our development options are.”

Officials of the museum, located in Newport Center, were counting on referendum approval of the Irvine Co.’s $300-million overall plan, keyed to office, retail and residential expansion. Plans also included building a larger museum next to the present Newport Harbor site.

If Newport Beach voters had approved the Newport Center overall plan, the museum could have proceeded with design and fund-raising studies for the 75,000-square-foot new facility, according to Consey. Construction, he added, could have started in 1988 on the structure, estimated to cost about $20 million.

But voter rejection of the company’s overall expansion means the museum may have to shelve that proposal or to scale it down considerably, Consey said.

Consey said it is not clear whether the Irvine Co. can still donate a three-acre vacant parcel for the new museum, as originally planned. That offer, Consey and company aides said, is being reevaluated.

(The existing 23,000-square-foot Newport Harbor Art Museum structure was built in 1977 at a cost of $900,000 on a two-acre site donated by the Irvine Co.)

Consey said a referendum defeat might mean resuming the museum’s search for sites outside of Newport Center. “That’s always been an option, especially if we feel we are so constrained by the lack of support here,” he added.

Last year, before the museum announced that it would stay at Newport Center with the “strong encouragement” of the Irvine Co., Consey said the museum board had been looking for sites closer to freeways. The search then involved two Irvine Co.-owned properties in Irvine plus discussions with the Segerstrom firm for a possible location in that firm’s South Coast Plaza mall-office sector.

The Gridlock organization, a citizens’ coalition opposed to the Irvine Co. plan, has maintained that it opposes only commercial developments which, members said, would generate massive traffic congestion. The museum expansion was not at issue, although they said it was used as “cultural window dressing” by the company to win approval of the overall Newport Center plan.