El Cortez Has Inside Track as New Courts Site

The former El Cortez Hotel Convention Center sits high on a steep hill at Beech Street and 8th Avenue, an appendage of the landmark, but vacant, high-rise hotel.

Seven blocks downhill, at 5th Avenue and Broadway, is the equally empty 8-story Walker-Scott department store, which in its quest for tenants bills itself as having “classic sophistication at a landmark address.”

One of the few activities at the El Cortez these days is professional boxing. Matches occur irregularly. Things are even slower down at the department store, where an indoor version of a swap meet wilted and died from a lack of customers. Now, the bench facing the big display windows on 5th provides derelicts a respite and the scent of urine has returned.

The two landmarks, such as they are, are pitted against each other for the “temporary” site of nine new civil Superior Courts scheduled for downtown.

The city of San Diego has agreed to provide $3 million in redevelopment funds for courtroom construction, and the staff of Centre City Development Corp., the agency responsible for administering those funds, wants the courtrooms in the department store. Rehabilitation of the Walker-Scott store, the CCDC contends, would do more to further overall downtown revitalization.

Late last month, CCDC staff submitted a report calling on its board of directors to approve a resolution urging county supervisors to select the old department store. On Nov. 3, CCDC’s board of directors put off a decision until this Friday to allow El Cortez representatives a chance to discuss the recommendation.

The county staff in charge of evaluating the competing sites says the El Cortez has met all the basic requirements--as did the Walker-Scott building. More important, the El Cortez can provide the courtrooms more cheaply, though the dollars involved are being kept secret because negotiations are incomplete.

Unless those negotiations hit a snag, though, the county staff will formally recommend the El Cortez site to the Board of Supervisors, perhaps as early as next month. And, in the end, it’s the county staff’s recommendation that matters.

The judges, who established minimum selection criteria such as 12-foot ceilings and 30- by 35-foot courtrooms to accommodate large exhibits presented at civil trials, are officially on the sidelines.

Superior Court Judge Wayne L. Peterson, chairman of the Superior Court master plan committee, said that, once judges were assured that the court’s space criteria could be met, then it became “a dollars and cents issue” left to the county.

“We understood the county’s position that it didn’t want the judiciary involved in the negotiations. . . . It boils down to the economics,” the judge said.

Bob Maxwell, the county’s deputy director of real property, said the county asked for bids early this year and it received more than a dozen responses. As the county whittled the list, El Cortez emerged as the best candidate to provide the required minimum 60,000 square feet because of cost.

He and the county are negotiating the final details with Grosvenor Industries and Minami Group, owners of the El Cortez. Just last month, the owners announced plans to renovate the historic hotel and use it as a centerpiece for a $250-million residential and commercial project, a plan that includes the courtrooms.

Both the owners of the 63-year-old El Cortez and the 54-year-old Walker-Scott building, O’Hill Partners, submitted their best and final offers. After those offers were evaluated, the county entered into exclusive negotiations with the El Cortez owners.

The city’s redevelopment officials have no quarrel with the process the county has used. But, given that both buildings meet the minimum space criteria, they believe use of the old department store, which closed in February, 1985, would have a greater impact on redeveloping Center City than the outlying El Cortez.

Pam Hamilton, executive director of the agency, said her agency’s stance is based solely on the issue of which surroundings would benefit most.

The El Cortez area is primarily residential, and the agency is trying to attract residents to the downtown. Hamilton fears that courtrooms on the hill will place pressure on the neighborhood to transform residential buildings into offices for lawyers.

Two years ago, the county spent $7 million to buy and renovate a 6th Avenue building one block from the El Cortez and turn it into the Family Court Building, where all domestic law and probates cases are now handled.

In Hamilton’s view, both the Walker-Scott building and the area around it are badly in need of a boost. The store is across the street from the historic Gaslamp Quarter, an area rich in what bureaucrats call “inappropriate uses” such as adult book stores, and abounding in vacancies.

“Courts would be ideal for that location,” Hamilton said, noting the department store building is next to Horton Plaza, restaurants and public transportation, including the trolley and Broadway bus corridor.

“The location of courtrooms at 5th and Broadway supports the Centre City Community Plan by keeping the facilities in close proximity to other similar public uses,” says CCDC’s staff report, calling El Cortez merely adequate.

“The Centre City Community Plan calls for a dense urban core and activity mode. The nine courts at 5th and Broadway would contribute to this goal,” according to the report.

Maxwell said he wasn’t aware of the CCDC staff position and “my only response is that it’s rather late in the process.” He emphasized that El Cortez was picked through competitive bid.

Whichever site is picked by the board of supervisors, the so-called temporary courtrooms will be in place for quite a while. Although the county is negotiating a five-year deal, Peterson said that “realistically speaking” the temporary courtrooms will be used for 10 years.

The space crunch is so bad that the county is now operating four Superior Courts in the San Diego Hotel. Under the expansion proposal under consideration, those courts would be closed and added to five new ones, for a total of nine. The additions would bring the number of Superior Courts downtown to more than 40.

At some point, all the courts downtown will be consolidated again. And, if the judges have their way, that will occur in a rebuilt and expanded county courthouse building. But no one is certain when that will happen, though estimates range from seven to 10 years.

The reason for the imprecision is that funding for new courtrooms was included in Proposition A, the half-cent sales tax increase approved by voters in June, 1988, but which was declared unconstitutional by a Riverside County Superior judge.

The judge said the measure needed approval by two-thirds of those voting and not just a majority. The county is appealing the decision, a process that could take two years.

The measure is expected to raise $1.6 billion to pay for new courts and jails. Even if Proposition A were in effect, Peterson said, the nine new temporary courtrooms would still have to be built.

“We’d be where we are right now with or without Proposition A” because the measure’s funds, if available, would have gone first to build new jails.