Vision of World Trade Center Is Coming Into Focus

A dozen years ago, a small band of Orange County business executives bought into a big dream.

They figured that foreign trade would play a big role in the county’s future, and they created a local chapter of an international trade network to help local importers and exporters.

Their dream was to build a major complex of offices, conference rooms, exhibit areas, retail shops and hotel rooms, all devoted to one activity--world trade.

Today, those executives, and hundreds more who have joined them in the World Trade Center Assn. of Orange County, are poised to turn their dream into reality.

The association is ready to develop a $100-million hotel-office complex on a vacant 5-acre site in downtown Santa Ana.

The group has put together a project team that has submitted its qualifications to the city in the first step of what it hopes will be a successful bid to develop the site.

‘A Symbol of Trade’

“A World Trade Center building is a symbol of international trade, like the Performing Arts Center is a symbol for Orange County,” said Susan T. Lentz, the association’s executive director.

“It’s a place where smaller businesses can go and get help for everything they need for foreign trade,” she said, “and where we can offer our services and make a difference for our members.”

Richard J. Schwarzstein, a Newport Beach lawyer who co-founded the group in 1976, said that each step in the association’s effort is a “vindication of the vision” of its founders.

The Orange County complex would be only the 11th World Trade Center in the United States and the 57th worldwide.

Santa Ana has long supported the group and its dream. The city, for instance, provides rent-free offices for the association. That subsidy demonstrates the city’s desire to have a World Trade Center complex, Mayor Dan Young said.

“We definitely want them, whether at this site or someplace else in the city,” Young said. “We are an international city. We’re the only city in Orange County to establish a foreign trade zone, and we’re starting to market the area to get those involved in international trade to locate there.”

While the association will be treated no differently than other developers who have competing proposals for the vacant land, it could have an inside track. The association’s concept includes preleased offices, and that “makes the whole thing work from the start,” said Roger Kooi, director of the Downtown Development Commission.

The effort to create a focal point for international trade in Orange County could hardly come at a better time, according to economist James Doti of Chapman College in Orange.

“The engine that will propel Orange County’s economic growth through the year 2000 is international trade,” Doti said in a recent interview. “It represents 10% of the county’s economy now, but it will grow from there.”

Doti said the industries most likely to grow rapidly with international trade are aerospace and high-tech, particularly microcomputers, telecommunications, process-control instrumentation, office automation and bio-tech and biomedical products.

The local chapter of the World Trade Center organization is competing with two other bidders to win approval from the Santa Ana Redevelopment Agency, a quasi-governmental unit that owns the land, for developing Centerpointe, the last vacant downtown urban renewal parcel.

The site, between the bus terminal and 4th Street on the southeast side of the Orange County Civic Center, has lain dormant for years.

In 1985, the agency gave Carley Capital Group of Milwaukee an exclusive right to develop the property as an $85-million hotel-office complex. But the proposed development was delayed when lawsuits were filed against the city and Carley.

Lentz said her group tried to get Carley to turn the project into an international trade center. The developer, after completing a survey indicating that a hotel in downtown Santa Ana wasn’t feasible, decided last fall that its plan wouldn’t work. Carley and the agency terminated their exclusive relationship.

The agency, determined to find someone who could follow through and develop the site, invited about 150 potential developers to submit their qualifications for bidding on a project. The local world trade chapter and two development firms were the only ones to file the required information.

With the aid of a consultant, Lentz said, the trade association sent out an eight-page survey to 2,500 Orange County companies to find out if they would support the center. Among other things, the surveyed firms were asked if they would consider moving all or part of their operations there. About 75 to 100 firms said they would relocate, she said.

‘All Heavyweights’

The consultant, H. Thomas Felvey, a Laguna Niguel architect, assembled a project team that includes the giant Bechtel Group in San Francisco, the Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and a Boston real estate developer, Cabot, Cabot & Forbes. Felvey also contacted Shearson Lehman Hutton, a Wall Street investment-banking firm, to help arrange financing for the project.

“Those are all heavyweights,” Kooi said.

No plans have been drawn up yet because the association is waiting to see if it is among the bidders chosen by the agency to submit formal plans. Lentz said the project would likely include a 13-story tower in a complex with 250,000 square feet of office space plus conference rooms, exhibit facilities and a hotel with up to 250 rooms.

Although the Carley survey indicated a hotel would be unfeasible, Lentz’s group believes that the concept of an international trade center would make a hotel possible.

In the early 1980s, Schwarzstein said, the trade group’s office was in the first building in Hutton Centre, then known as Warmington Plaza, near the Costa Mesa and San Diego freeways.

The association tried to have the building turned into a World Trade Center, but leasing agents instead rented out whole floors to large companies, including Butterfield Savings & Loan, and largely ignored the potential for an international trade center, Schwarzstein said.

The group moved to new quarters in downtown Santa Ana and renewed its search for a building site.

Lentz said her group will do another hotel-feasibility survey, tailoring it to those involved in international trade and World Trade Center activities. She said she feels certain that the need is there.

The group is also confident that a trade center building is needed in Orange County, even though a 27-story World Trade Center office tower and hotel complex is being built on 12.7 acres in Long Beach.

“Long Beach is a location for moving cargo through its harbor,” Schwarzstein said. “It’s port-oriented, like the centers in New Orleans and Boston.”

Orange County’s plan for a World Trade Center, he said, is oriented more toward serving small high-technology companies with legal, financial and other trade-related services that wouldn’t simply duplicate all the services Long Beach will provide.

It would be patterned more after Atlanta’s center, which concentrates on services other than shipping, he added.

Lentz said the survey showed that association members would rather go to an Orange County center anyway, even if Long Beach offered the same services.

Seminars on Trading

The local chapter provides programs and seminars on international trading and, through its international network, a system to link buyers and sellers and to find distributors and products they could use.

As part of the World Trade Center Institute, a joint venture with Coastline Community College, the chapter maintains an international trade-resource library at the college’s Corona del Mar campus.

Though the Orange County chapter’s emphasis for many years was to build a center, its efforts have since turned to helping firms with international trade, particularly exports. It has become a satellite office for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s export efforts and works with the California Trade Commission’s program for export finance.

Starting out with a handful of executives whose companies were already engaged in international trade, the group became the 27th chapter approved by the association’s leaders in New York. It has grown to include 750 members from 500 companies and expects to end the year with 1,000 members from 700 companies, Lentz said.

Dollar’s Fall a Factor

The association’s growth lately has been spurred by increased world trade as the value of the dollar has fallen. The international network has 162 chapters worldwide in 62 countries. Its 300,000 members represent 60,000 firms.

Lentz and Schwarzstein said that even if they fail in their efforts to develop the Santa Ana property into the ninth World Trade Center building in the nation, the organization will remain active in Orange County.

“We are not going to own the building anyway,” said Schwarzstein, noting that the other members of the development team would own the complex.

“But we will always be a catalyst for international trade--a nonprofit, education-minded, civic-minded, business-minded organization.”

WORLD TRADE CENTER COMPLEXES IN U.S.

Atlanta

Baltimore

Boston

Hartford, Conn.

Houston

New Orleans

New York City (headquarters of World Trade Centers Assn.)

St. Paul, Minn.

Under Construction:

Chicago

Long Beach

Source: World Trade Center Assn. of Orange County