NEWPORT ART MUSEUM REVIEWING ITS OPTIONS

Newport Harbor Art Museum officials are reviewing their options after plans for a major building expansion were stymied in a local election that rejected an overall development plan for Newport Center, an office and shopping sector in that city.

“This (Newport Center) is where we want to stay,” said museum director Kevin Consey. “Our mission is to improve our standing as a contemporary-art museum of regional, even national, importance. But we cannot do that if we’re not allowed to grow, if we cannot properly expand.”

The museum’s proposal to build a new and larger home was part of an overall $300-million Newport Center expansion that the Irvine Co. seeks in the firm’s commercial showplace, which includes the Fashion Island mall.

But that overall plan--geared chiefly to huge new office, retail and housing developments--was resoundingly voted down Tuesday in a citywide referendum called by a citizens’ “slow-growth” coalition opposed to the overall plan.

While coalition leaders maintained they oppose only the commercial developments--not the museum expansion--Newport Harbor Art Museum officials Wednesday said voter rejection has thrown the museum’s development into disarray.

“It (the vote result), of course, is a great disappointment,” said museum director Kevin Consey. “Right now, it’s too early to tell you 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.”

If Newport Beach voters had approved the Newport Center overall plan, the museum could have gone ahead with design and fund-raising studies for a 75,000-square-foot new museum to be built next to the existing structure, Consey said. 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.

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

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

Consey said the referendum defeat might mean resuming the museum’s search for sites outside 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 in 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. There were also discussions with the Segerstrom firm for a possible locale in that firm’s South Coast Plaza mall/office sector.)

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

“Everyone wants the museum to stay in Newport Beach and to expand. Our concern is what could happen with all those office buildings going up,” said Gridlock spokesman Allan Beek.

“We see the museum as a matter independent of the rest of the (Newport Center) developments. There’s no reason why the museum can’t go it alone and submit its own plan to the city.”

But Consey said that under the existing city plan for the Newport Center, the museum is allowed only “minor expansion”--about 8,000 square feet. “That level of expansion wouldn’t begin to meet our needs,” he added.

According to city aides, with the referendum defeat of the Irvine Co. plan, state law precludes submission of any “substantially similar” plan for one year.