City Halls Cramp Style of S. County Employees : Government: Officials of newly incorporated cities work in makeshift, crowded conditions. Some citizens are left wondering where to find their public servants.

From the counter of his video store, Scott Zody has seen “lots of them” wander in, with puzzled, lost looks on their faces.

They are people in search of City Hall.

“I just send them upstairs,” said Zody, his index finger pointing to the ceiling.

There they will find the Dana Point City Hall, wedged between Dr. Kirk Hobeck’s dentist office and Dana Point Dermatology, directly above Top Hits Video and the Bank of America.

In nearby Laguna Niguel, city officials might have chosen a headquarters in the city’s grandiose, cavernous, landmark Chet Holifield Federal Building. Instead, City Hall, at least part of it, sits in an obscure industrial park next door to the Aliso Creek Presbyterian Church.

Laguna Niguel City Manager Tim Casey acknowledges the shortcomings of accommodations in his temporary office, but he manages to keep it all in perspective.

All over the South County, an area in which three cities (Mission Viejo, Dana Point and Laguna Niguel) can each count their ages on one hand, city halls are not the edifices of stability and endurance. Rather, they are makeshift headquarters with a landlord’s rent due on a monthly basis.

The quarters are often cramped, people have trouble finding them, and in all three cases, officials long for a more enduring symbol of municipal self-rule.

But until the new cities do get their modern city halls, city employees will have to make do.

That can make life interesting, if not exasperating, said Laguna Niguel’s Casey.

“We’re certainly a makeshift environment here, to say the least,” Casey said. “I’m in a 4,000-square-foot space with six of my staff. The rest of my people are down the parking lot, past a dance academy, past a medical corporate facility in what we call the annex. One hundred yards past that, if you enter a parking lot and hang a left, you’ll find our community development staff.”

With this kind of arrangement, forget the luxury of modern communication, Casey said.

“Our phone systems are not integrated, so I have to dial a seven-digit number to talk to a department head,” Casey said. “To make things more interesting, we don’t have centralized data processing either, so there is no ability to share data. If I draft a report to the City Council, 90% of all the hard copy has to be retyped.”

At the least, the lack of a city hall allows the Laguna Niguel community a certain sense of unity, said Mayor Patricia C. Bates.

“One thing you surely won’t get an argument about here is City Hall should be expanded,” she said.

Even in the relatively established city of Mission Viejo, now nearing its third birthday, City Hall still sits on the ground floor of a nondescript office building on La Alameda, just off Crown Valley Parkway. The Mission Viejo Co. managed to spend 20 years master-planning “the California Promise” but provided no acreage for its city headquarters.

Mission Viejo resident Milt Gerloff remembers his first trip there, armed with a Thomas Bros. guide. He soon found out there are no signs on Crown Valley Parkway to help visitors out.

“It can be confusing the first time,” Gerloff explained. “I got a little mixed up when I got off of Crown Valley and turned left instead of right. I knew it was around there somewhere but the streets were so new, they weren’t even on the maps yet. Even when you get to the parking lot, you’re still not sure you’re in the right place because there are no signs until you get to the front door.”

Its saving grace might be that it’s pink, said Norma Graves, a receptionist for the building department.

“It’s the only pink building in the area, that’s how I explain it to people,” Graves said.

Inside City Hall, City Manager Fred Sorsabal, who formerly worked in more established city halls in Costa Mesa and El Segundo, can now relate to the problems of other tenants. City workers have had to fend for themselves during a recent infestation of mice and rats.

“We can’t seem to get our landlord to get them taken care of,” Sorsabal said.

William O. Talley, city manager of Dana Point who served in the same position for Mission Viejo, places the blame for the city hall predicament on the county, which was until a few years ago the planner for most of South County. The problem has been a lack of available land on which to build a city hall, Talley said.

“The county made no provisions for any future form of municipal governments in these areas while they were unincorporated territory,” Talley said. “The newly created cities found themselves with no property to house the institutions of government.”

Mission Viejo’s problem still irks Talley today, despite the fact he has moved south.

“In Mission Viejo, there was never any requirement by the county for the developer to set aside property, even though it was known for 10 or 12 years that it would soon become a city,” said Talley.

Instead, the company sold the city its old headquarters for $3.1 million, and city officials estimate it will spend at least another $1 million renovating it, said Assistant City Manager Dan Joseph.

That purchase remains a source of controversy throughout the city, Joseph said. Some residents believe that the city needs to to build a new city hall elsewhere.

If Mission Viejo is any example, business is done differently these days than it was earlier in the county. It used to be that cities got help, Talley said.

“These are things that typically developers have had to pay for,” Talley said. “What happened in the old-line cities was they would go out and purchase some land and either get a donation or extract money from a developer.”

A case in point could be Irvine, which back in 1971 was the last county city to incorporate before the three new South County cities. Since March, 1989, the city has enjoyed a state-of-the-art, $38-million, 200,000-square-foot city hall built on 15 acres in the middle of town. The 15 acres were donated by the Irvine Co.

But Irvine started out with 500 square feet of rented space in an Irvine Co. office building in the old Town Center across Campus Drive from UC Irvine.

That was fine for a city of 13,000 and a staff of fewer than 15 people, said Paul O. Brady Jr., the city’s current city manager and an original member of the Irvine staff.

“When we were smaller and beholden to the county for most of our services, it didn’t much matter,” Brady said. “But as we grew and took on those services in-house, we had to keep leasing more space.”

From that 500 square feet, Irvine wound up leasing 25,000 square feet, the entire second floor of the building near UCI. By 1985, the city had moved to its old 40,000-square-foot civic center on Jamboree Road, where it continued mushrooming across the street and down the block.

Most city officials agree that leasing space for a city hall is not the answer.

“A study we did, which was supported by an advisory vote of the people, showed that in the long term it’s . . . a lot cheaper to own your own building than to keep leasing,” Brady said.

That is doubly true considering the fact that office space generally wasn’t designed to house a city government.

“There’s no question that it doesn’t make good sense to keep on paying ever-increasing amounts of rent in a building not designed as a municipal building,” Talley said. “Municipal facilities have some unique requirements. You need areas for the public to congregate, lobbies, for example, for people who come and want to research records. Plus you need a lot more storage space because governments run on amounts of paper that would dwarf most normal businesses. And you have to keep and store all that paperwork.”

Then there is always the unknown involved anytime one deals with a landlord, or two landlords in the case of the spread out configuration of Laguna Niguel City Hall.

“I’ve got two different landlords with two different agendas for the future,” Casey said. “That kind of makes things interesting.”