County OKs Hyatt Resort Despite Foes’ Housing Plea : Development: Critics say the $140-million project makes no provision for sheltering low-income workers it would bring to area.

The County Board of Supervisors, rejecting a last-ditch appeal by a group of housing advocates, on Tuesday unanimously approved construction of a $140-million Hyatt Hotel resort south of Newport Beach.

The vote marked the final hurdle for the long-debated, 450-room hotel project to be built just off Newport Coast Drive, formerly Pelican Hill Road. Construction is expected to begin in early 1992 and could be completed sometime in 1994.

The board vote came after an hourlong public hearing in which opponents of the project argued that the resort would bring in minimum-wage workers without supplying them with adequate, inexpensive housing. The result, opponents charged, could be increased traffic and air pollution--the result of workers commuting to and from the hotel--as well as additional pressure on the already stressed low-income housing supply in Costa Mesa and Santa Ana.

The hotel is one phase of the Newport Coast development, which will also include residential areas, golf courses and other hotels in an unincorporated pocket just north of Crystal Cove State Park.

Although the project will include several hundred “low-income” housing units, opponents charged that even they will be too high-priced for most hotel workers to afford. Those units are designed to be purchased by families with an income of $27,000 to $45,000 a year.

“Even a two wage-earner family, both working full-time at minimum wage, such as may be true of two hotel workers, will earn only about $18,000 a year,” said Kay Virginia Gustafson, a member of the HOUSING NOW! Coalition. “None of these individuals, even as a two wage-earner family, has sufficient income” to pay for the low-income units.

Supporters of the hotel, however, said the coastal project already includes several hundred low-income housing units and would supply jobs for county residents who are already looking for work--and who therefore do not need new housing. At the same time, the development plan preserves vast amounts of open space in return for letting the Irvine Co., owner of the property, develop the land.

That part of the proposal helped win support from Friends of the Irvine Coast, an environmental group.

Once complete, the resort will supply $5.5 million a year in badly needed tax revenue to the county government, proponents said. That money will come from hotel-occupancy taxes, and more is likely to be generated as guests shop and eat in nearby areas, contributing to local sales-tax revenue.

It was the hotel’s potential economic impact that helped galvanize support from several local chambers of commerce and merchants’ groups.

Richard Gartrell, president of the Newport Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau, said the project will make the area “more competitive with such places as Palm Springs and Scottsdale.”

Gartrell and other supporters of the project told the supervisors that while the county may want to consider amending its low-income housing policies, that debate should not affect the Newport Coast project or the Hyatt Hotel.

The housing advocates who appeared at the board meeting, however, argued that the hotel will add pressure to the county’s already limited supply of low-income housing. HOUSING NOW! representatives argued that the board should reject the project and force the Irvine Co. and Hyatt Corp. to provide more low-income housing before granting approval to the hotel.

In particular, they said, the plans would provide housing for moderately low-income workers, but would not help minimum-wage laborers, which they said would include many of the hotel’s new employees.

“What about housing for the very-low-income workers?” asked Joe Caux, chairman of the Orange County Renters Assn. “We do insist that . . . projects do their fair share.”

Costa Mesa Mayor Mary Hornbuckle also expressed her concerns in a letter to the supervisors, and Patricia Harrigan, president of the League of Women Voters of Orange County, asked the board to deny the project as well.

Board members listened impassively as each side made its case, rarely interrupting with questions. At the conclusion of the session, Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose district includes the hotel site, said he was convinced that the concerns of the housing advocates had been adequately addressed, and his colleagues followed his lead in supporting it.