Pasadena Citizens Group Seeks City Help Ousting Mall Owner

Four years after they were kicked out of the Plaza Pasadena shopping mall while trying to collect signatures for a proposed ballot initiative, a citizens group has turned the tables and is now trying to kick out the company that operates the mall.

The group, Pasadena Citizens for Representative Government, has set up tables inside the mall to collect signatures for a petition urging the city’s Board of Directors to support a lawsuit that seeks termination of the contract with the Hahn Co., which now runs the mall.

The citizens group is also working with the San Gabriel Valley Democratic Party and the Pasadena-Foothills Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union to collect signatures of support for a proposed civil liberties ordinance.

The group will take the petitions to a meeting of the Board of Directors, asking them to pass the ordinance, which would allow nearly unlimited access to the city’s shopping centers, mini-malls and grocery stores for political campaigning and fund-raising solicitations.

“I have an inkling it’s the first anyplace,” said City Atty. Victor Kaleta of the proposed ordinance.

Earlier this month, the board directed Kaleta to analyze the legality of the ordinance for future discussion by the board.

Hahn Co. attorney Tom Leanse, who declined to comment on the proposed ordinance, said he believes the drive to end the Hahn Co.’s involvement in the plaza is merely a ploy to focus attention on the civil liberties ordinance.

“I think that . . . may have been the plan, and they’ve accomplished that, whether it was an intended goal or not,” Leanse said.

But attorney Dale Gronemeier, who represents the citizens group, said the organization seeks an end to the Hahn Co.’s management because the company has “repeatedly violated citizens’ constitutional rights to engage in free speech, petition and electoral activity in the shopping center.”

In 1980, the San Diego-based Hahn Co., operator of 20 shopping centers statewide, struck a partnership with Carter Hawley Hale to build the Plaza Pasadena, which the partnership now owns. The shopping center stands on Colorado Boulevard between Los Robles and Marengo avenues on land owned by the city’s redevelopment agency. The agency, since re-named the Development Commission , owns the parking garage beneath the shopping center. The garage is leased to the Hahn Co. for $217,000 annually.

It is that lease that the Pasadena Citizens for Representative Government and the Democratic Party seek to end through a lawsuit filed four years ago that is still pending, Gronemeier said. The petitions being circulated urge the board to support the legal action, he said, a move made possible by recent disagreements.

“City Hall and the Hahn Co. have not been getting along,” the attorney said. “The relationship is strained.”

In September, the Hahn Co. objected to a Civic Center master plan proposal that would have removed the glass windows and doors from the two-story plaza archway at Garfield Avenue. That issue was left undecided when the master plan was approved by the board. In addition, Gronemeier said, the city has been rebuffed in its efforts to obtain use of the shopping center parking spaces for downtown development.

The citizens group’s disagreements with the Hahn Co. date to 1985, when members of the group sought to enter the plaza two days before Christmas to obtain signatures for a ballot initiative. The Hahn Co., which prohibited all such political activity from the day after Thanksgiving until Jan. 2, obtained a restraining order against the group.

The action began a round of legal maneuvers, lawsuits, appellate court decisions and challenges that included an attempt by the San Gabriel Democratic Party in 1988 to register voters at the plaza .

As a result of a February, 1989, California appellate court decision, the Hahn Co. can now prohibit fund-raising solicitations and can impose written rules for political organizations using the mall. Access to the mall is allowed except for the day after Thanksgiving and from Dec. 15 to Dec. 26.

But the Hahn Co. will fight those rules next year when it appeals the appellate court ruling and the original lawsuit finally goes to trial, Leanse said.

“We intend to pursue the protection of private property rights (and prohibit activity) that interferes with the business of a shopping center,” he said.

Gronemeier insists that with its holiday rules, the Hahn Co. is violating a 1979 California Supreme Court case that allows citizens to engage in petitioning, leafletting, voter registration and other free speech activities in shopping centers.

In addition, he said, the court case must continue because other shopping centers are misinterpreting earlier case law in the Pasadena battle.

“Shopping centers are using (an earlier court) decision improperly to exclude” free speech activities throughout the state, he said.