MISSION VIEJO : Planners Approve Shopping Center

Over neighborhood protests, the Planning Commission approved plans Tuesday for a 20-acre shopping center.

After a three-hour public hearing, the commission voted 3-1 to allow the Mission Viejo Co. to build 158,150 square feet of retail and office space, a six-screen cinema and restaurant on Santa Margarita Parkway near Los Alisos Boulevard.

The completion date for the proposed Trabuco Hills Shopping Center is February, 1991, said Wayne Peterson, director of planning for the developer. The Mission Viejo Co. also plans to build a medical office building, retail shops, an auto service center and a gas station on the site.

Although seemingly resigned to the overall project, about 25 residents in the heavily residential section of northeast Mission Viejo, at the base of the Saddleback mountains, protested the plans to build the cinema within 300 feet of a housing tract.

With Trabuco Hills High School on nearby Cordova Road, homeowners said students would loiter near the theater, causing problems and making noise. “This is too close to the high school,” said Gerry Matsukane, a board member of the Evergreen Ridge Homeowners Assn.

While most people will use the cinema “just a few nights a year,” she said, “our homeowners are going to be bothered every night of the year.”

But the harshest criticism of the cinema was leveled by Planning Commission Chairman Craig Galbraith, the lone vote against the project.

“There will be fights,” he said. “There will be drug deals going on back there. There’s no doubt of that.”

But the panel’s majority sided with the judgment of the County Sheriff’s Department, which saw no problem policing the area. “As far as unsavory characters hanging out at movie theaters,” Sheriff’s Lt. George Johnson said Wednesday, “that’s not our experience here in South Orange County.”

At least one security guard will patrol the shopping center, Peterson said.

Several area residents spoke in favor of the cinemas. Young Lee, who lives about half a mile from the site, said the theaters would be a family center.

“I’d like to see a happy hour there, a family happy hour,” he said.

The center would be the second shopping center in the area. Portola Plaza, a 21-acre collection of retail stores, is across Santa Margarita Parkway from the proposed center.

Also in the works for the area is a football stadium at Trabuco Hills High.

The shopping center has also been criticized by the Saddleback Area Coordinating Council, a citizen’s committee sponsored by the county that reviews development issues in Saddleback Valley.

“Traffic keeps getting worse and worse as time goes on,” said coordinating council member Jim Thor.