Irvine Co. to Give Schools Donation If Project Passes

In what one critic called an “obscenely manipulative” attempt to buy votes, the Irvine Co. announced this week that it will donate $1 million to Irvine public schools and will contribute another $2 million if major development proposals are approved.

The announcement comes a month before one of the company’s major development projects, the proposed 3,850-home Westpark II community, goes before Irvine voters on the Nov. 5 ballot. However, an Irvine Co. spokeswoman said the coming election had nothing to do with the timing of the donation, which was announced at Tuesday’s meeting of the Irvine Unified School District board.

The $1-million gift is one of the largest single amounts ever donated to a school district in the county, although the Irvine Co. and other developers have given far more than that to districts over a number of years, said Maureen DiMarco, Gov. Pete Wilson’s secretary for child development and education and a Garden Grove Unified School District board member.

Irvine Co. spokeswoman Dawn McCormick said the district had approached the Irvine Co. for help in setting up an endowment fund to benefit schools and last month decided to establish it. Most of the $1-million donation will be placed in the fund, district officials said.

The company is tying future gifts to the approval of development projects because that is when the company makes money and can afford to make donations, McCormick said.

However, Christopher B. Mears, a leader of the Irvine Tomorrow group that gathered enough signatures to force a public vote on Westpark II after the Irvine City Council approved the project in December, criticized the donation. He said the timing of the gift and linking the money to development projects is an obvious attempt to win public support for the developer’s projects.

“Why make it a carrot, particularly on an issue like education,” Mears said Wednesday. “That particularly smacks of manipulation. It’s such an emotional issue for all parents, me included, to equate further development with salvaging our school programs. It’s obscenely manipulative.”

Last week, campaign statements filed by the Irvine Co. showed the developer had spent $185,625 so far on the campaign, including the costs of three telephone surveys, poster-size mailers and fees paid to campaign consultants.

Besides the $3-million commitment to the Irvine Unified School District, the company earlier said it would give $5 million to the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, also tying much of the money to development projects within the district, McCormick said.

“The Irvine Co. has a history of being not only good neighbors but good partners with school district and education in general,” DiMarco said. The company has given so much in the past to Irvine schools that “most communities wish they were blessed with their own Irvine Cos.”

Mears, however, called the gifts “relatively small financial gestures.” The Irvine Co. stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars once it is allowed to proceed with the Westpark II project, he said. The gifts represent a tiny fraction of the profit the company will be earning, he said.

Irvine Unified school board President Helen Cameron said the district and the Irvine Co. have been and are continuing to discuss setting up and operating the endowment fund. The coming election over Westpark II seems to be “definitely part of the timing” for the company to announce its gift, Cameron said.