Development of Regional Park

Don’t you just love it when rascals, caught in the act, squirm before the lights?

For starters you might want to take in the Oct. 27 Orange City Council meeting. Here you can see the council explain to hundreds of irate citizens why the city has been bending over backward to help a local gravel pit operator turn a relatively worthless 90-acre hole in the ground into a multimillion-dollar chunk of real estate.

The man in question, Paul Clearay Jr., president of R. J. Noble Co., is not to be faulted in all of this, as who can blame him for not taking advantage of the sweet deals local governing agencies have been offering him?

The gravel pit in question is located along the Santa Ana River between Lincoln Avenue and Glassell Street on county land that had been master-planned as Five Coves Regional Park. Hundreds of people bought their homes around this park site with the promise that the pit would eventually be a lake.

In May, 1980, however, the Orange County Board of Supervisors quietly dropped plans for the park. The plans were dropped so quietly, in fact, that Thomas Bros. maps continued to show the park until recently. Most of the surrounding residents were still in the dark, however.

Enter then the City of Orange with a proposal to annex the land, take it off the master plan as parkland and change the zoning to commercial-manufacturing. This would naturally cause the land value to skyrocket. But Orange is offering to include the pit in a specially created redevelopment zone so that R. J. Noble could build its factories with low-interest government loans.

Everyone knows that factories need roads to move those trucks, so Orange has plans to plow a four-lane highway through the middle of the Tamarain-Orange town houses. Too bad that this would wipe out the local residents’ guest parking and a modest but beautiful green belt, but who’s free ride is this? This clever part of the plan now brings industrial traffic a few feet from the doors of all of those people who paid for “lake front property.”

Now comes my ax to grind in this whole thing. I’m one of those fools who looked at an outdated Thomas Bros. map when I bought my town home in Tamarain-Orange last month. I’m thinking maybe I should hit Orange up for a zone change myself.

But then, if I really had my druthers, I’d just as soon see them go back to the park idea and fill that gravel pit up with water and catfish. After all, since I moved to Orange, I’ve gotten used to the smell of fish.

BILL GANN

Orange