Van de Kamp Is Opposed, but Pike Planners Vow to Proceed

Despite the state attorney general’s sudden leap into a yearlong legal fight to block a complex at the former site of the Pike amusement park, developers are vowing to go “right straight ahead” with work on one of the nation’s largest renewal endeavors.

Construction is scheduled to begin by the end of next year on the oceanfront 3-million-acre, $900-million “city-within-a-city,” described by City Hall as the centerpiece of a downtown renaissance--and by critics as an assault on the local environment.

“We are going right straight ahead with the project,” said Wayne Ratkovich, one of several influential developers for the Pike project. “We are not hesitating for a moment. We have a very low regard for the attorney general’s opinion.”

Ratkovich was responding to a friend-of-the-court opinion filed last week by Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, who said the city violated in environmental laws when it approved the Pike plan last year.

The brief was a boost to 800 members of Long Beach Area Citizens Involved and other area watchdog groups that have sued to stop the project, which would include 250 condominium units, a 300-suite hotel and 200,000 square feet of office space.

Opponents say the project and other downtown developments will attract thousands of cars, pollute the air and turn surrounding neighborhoods into “freeway off-ramps.”

The critics lost in a trial earlier this year, then turned to the state Court of Appeal, where Van de Kamp’s opinion will be considered along with volumes of evidence. A hearing date is pending.

But Ratkovich--an influential businessman known for restoring the Wiltern Theatre complex and other historic buildings in Los Angeles--said he is confident that the lawsuit will ultimately fail and that Long Beach will see the completion of a development that has been likened to Embarcadero Center in San Francisco.

“I can’t imagine,” Ratkovich said, “that an attorney general of any state is so wise and so all-seeing and all-knowing that he has . . . greater wisdom than the citizens of Long Beach, the (city) Planning Commission, the Redevelopment Agency, the state Coastal Commission and the City Council.”

Critics say a nest of downtown buildings already approved by the city would bring 114,000 more cars into town daily--more than one-third of them generated by the Pike project. (That figure does not take into account the resort and theme park proposal that was recently unveiled by Walt Disney Co., which could attract 13 million tourists a year.)

Long Beach Area Citizens Involved and others argue that the city broke the law by failing to consider the total of environmental damage that mammoth development could bring--further stressing Ocean Boulevard, 7th Street, Broadway and other beleaguered east-west corridors.

“Those streets are already crowded,” Long Beach Area Citizens Involved attorney Marc Allen Coleman said. “Where are they going to put 114,000 more cars? The law says you cannot approve a project until these kinds of problems are mitigated. I can’t believe they are planning a city this way.”

But city officials and developers contend that environmental problems have been considered and that steps have been taken to make sure Long Beach can absorb such impacts, not to mention the wealth of tax revenue new development would bring.

Assistant City Manager John Shirey said: “We recognize that whether it be Disney or the Pike project or somebody who wants to expand a hot dog stand, there will be traffic issues. But we think people underestimate the ability of the current transportation system to handle traffic in Long Beach . . . and they underestimate our resolve to make sure those problems are worked out.”

City officials are confident that the Pike project will ultimately go forward. But, they wonder, when?

Plans for the Pike were unveiled with great fanfare two years ago. But the land south of Ocean Boulevard between Magnolia and Pine avenues remains an ugly patchwork of vacant lots.

“It’s very important for downtown,” Community Development Director Susan Shick said, “so we would like to see it started. A major project is always better under construction than simply talked about.”

Shick and others looked to the slumping economy, the savings and loan crisis and a general “real estate trough” to explain the apparent delay.

But developers said the project is not behind schedule at all, just moving steadily through a maze of conditions to put together a virtually self-contained community of homes, shops, hotel rooms and offices.

Ratkovich said: “The architects are hard at work, and there are armies of engineers gathering in Long Beach as we speak. There is an enormous amount of work to do on a project this size.”

After the project won full approval last year, developers retained New York-based Salomon Bros. Inc. to help them market the idea in what is now a global search for investors.

Bruce Hart, manager of Pike Properties Associates, would not discuss financing details, other than to say it is going “very well.” Pike Properties--a partnership of the Ratkovich Co., Enterprise Development Co. of Columbia, Md., and Copley Real Estate Advisers of Boston--bought the site in 1986.

Hart said the real estate slump would not affect a project of this size, which would be built over 15 years and through two or three real estate cycles.

“We’re talking with investors who have the capacity to invest in a $900-million project,” Hart said. “These are people with a very long-term view. We’re not selling a building that will be occupied tomorrow.”

Each of the project’s four phases will be decided according to the demands of the market of the day, Hart said.