COSTA MESA/NEWPORT/IRVINE : COSTA MESA : General Plan to Get Further Hearings

The City Council reviewed its proposed General Plan this week and heard still more protests from residents about everything from noise to traffic congestion.

More hearings on the plan have been scheduled for Nov. 1 in the City Council chambers. The hearings will center on a new land-use designation that would include the controversial Home Ranch project, the subject of a bitter battle between developers and slow-growth proponents.

The plan would set the city’s first building limits for commercial, industrial and institutional land uses, and it would reduce the limits for high-density residential development. The plan also would allow commercial office space to increase by 63% and industrial office space by 93%. It envisions a 46% increase in traffic by the year 2010, and a 9.1% decrease in the number of single-family, detached homes in the city by that date.

Critics have charged that the plan will lead to rampant overdevelopment and more traffic congestion. According to surveys, residents believe overdevelopment and traffic are the city’s two biggest problems.

“The proposed General Plan allows and is designed to encourage high-density development,” said Jan Luymes, a member of the 16-person General Plan Steering Committee. The committee is an ad hoc group of representatives of homeowners associations and city agencies.

The committee also opposes the amount of development allowed in the proposed General Plan for the C.J. Segerstrom & Sons Home Ranch project on a 98-acre parcel bounded by Fairview Road, the San Diego Freeway, Harbor Boulevard and Sunflower Avenue.

It would allow about 2 million square feet of commercial space, plus residential development. The steering committee has suggested that the Home Ranch project be limited to 1,250,000 square feet of space.