Westpark II Uproar Should Put Irvine Co. on Notice

It’s hell being on the wrong side of history, the position in which the Irvine Co. increasingly finds itself. Last year, Laguna Beach residents said no to Laguna Laurel and its proposed 3,200 homes in Laguna Canyon. This week, a group of Irvine residents calling itself Irvine Tomorrow forced a November vote on Westpark II and its vision of 3,800 homes, with the hope of scaling down the size and pace of the project.

In Laguna Beach, the Irvine Co. scored some public relations points by working in good faith with the city to preserve the canyon. No doubt the company was hoping that what happened in Laguna Beach was attributable to the canyon’s aesthetic and symbolic appeal and the work of supercharged environmental activists in the historically liberal coastal city.

But here comes Irvine, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats, 2 to 1. And while the company may tell itself that Irvine Tomorrow is a group of refugees from a Larry Agran seminar, it will do so at its peril.

You don’t need to be a registered Democrat to be concerned about urban and suburban sprawl in Orange County or to wonder just how many more “planned” villages this old place can take.

That’s what Christopher Mears is counting on. He’s a lawyer who is also the chairman of Irvine Tomorrow. Far from being afraid of the powerful Irvine Co., he sounds like a guy who can’t wait to get in the ring with them.

“We got 9,000 petition signatures in eight days,” he said. “We had over 100 petition circulators and, to a person, these people reported that not only were people eager to sign but that they were seeking us out to sign our petitions. And, they were verbalizing the strongest kind of anti-growth sentiment.”

How much of that confidence will survive to November remains to be seen.

But after being relatively inactive in recent years, Irvine Tomorrow is making no bones about its desire to challenge the City Council’s authority to move ahead with the Irvine Co.’s plans.

“We live in a company town at this point in our history,” Mears said. “The Irvine Co. thought it died and went to heaven when Sally Anne Sheridan (a real estate agent) was elected mayor. Now it realizes it’s living in purgatory. Her pro-growth position has helped to galvanize public sentiment against company policy and council policies.”

That suggested that the issue over Westpark II is as much about power and decision-making as anything else. “It is a power struggle,” Mears agreed. “This referendum will have historic significance, because in my opinion it’s going to shape the political landscape for the next decade.”

I asked Mears whether he is guilty of the age-old crime of wanting to close the doors to the city after he has moved in. “I take issue with that,” he said. “It isn’t a mentality of excluding people from coming to Irvine. It is concern about preserving sufficient open space and the physical beauty and keeping housing densities and transportation problems on a level that will permit us to enjoy sufficient quality in our lives to stay here.”

The current council generally lines up, 4 to 1, against the wishes of Irvine Tomorrow, Mears said. And while acknowledging that the council majority was duly elected, he said that development issues were not especially hot at election time in June.

And the concern about taking on the vaunted power of the Irvine Co. hardly bothers Mears.

“Certain people are much less afraid of the company, and our group in particular has no fear of it,” Mears said Friday. “We see these issues pretty clearly and in pretty stark terms.

“If the future development of the city is left to the Irvine Co., then within the next decade the size of this town will double. We don’t believe the Irvine Co. has the right to foist upon this city the kind of problems that that kind of development, in the way they want to build it out, will entail.”

The Irvine Co. has said it will present its arguments for Westpark II between now and the election. It will have to persuade people that the growth that made sense in the 1970s still makes sense in the 1990s.

As the planner and shaper of Irvine, the company has its master plan for building out the community. The plan is still treated as a sacred document by some. Last week, Councilman Bill Vardoulis said: “I and many people moved here because it was a planned community. Everybody knew where we were headed.”

That may have been true in a quieter, less congested time. But with population growth starting to gnaw at people’s psyches, one can almost hear Irvine residents borrowing a line from “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”:

“Master plan? We don’t need no stinking master plan.”