2 Top Disney Developers Squared Off : Resorts: And the winner was Kerry Hunnewell, charged with planning the $3-billion park next to Disneyland.

For Jack Lindquist, a decade of dreaming all came together almost a week ago on a scrap of paper marked simply with the words, “Go ahead. Set up the meetings.”

The cryptic phone message had come Monday from Disney Development Co. headquarters in Burbank, and the cherub-faced Disneyland president immediately knew what it meant. Anaheim had been selected as the site of the $3-billion Disneyland Resort over a competing project in Long Beach.

“It was the happiest day in my life,” Lindquist would later recall. “I wanted to run upstairs and shout it from the rooftops. But on something like this, I felt that the less people know about it, the better.”

So he kept the news under wraps, even from his wife, Belle, until the night before Thursday’s public announcement.

Disney’s Anaheim decision had come straight from the offices of Disney Chairman Michael D. Eisner and President Frank Wells. It was the culmination of two years of intense planning by a pair of executives chosen to develop theme park-hotel resorts on each site, knowing that only one would come away the winner.

And the winner was Kerry Hunnewell, charged with planning for a world’s fair-style park to be built in the Disneyland parking lot. The loser was David Malmuth, who had planned an ocean-oriented theme park next to the Queen Mary.

On paper at least, they are a matched pair. Both are 36 and hold the title of vice president for the Disney Development Co. Both were honor students with MBAs--Malmuth’s from Stanford and Hunnewell’s from Harvard. They worked in coveted positions for other developers before joining Disney, Malmuth in 1988 and Hunnewell in 1989. Both are highly competitive.

“I don’t think you would say it was a rivalry,” said Ron Dominguez, who oversees both Disneyland and the Queen Mary as executive vice president of Walt Disney Attractions/West Coast. “They were loyal to the projects and they were working hard to make it a reality.”

Hunnewell said he didn’t often chat with his Long Beach counterpart during the process. “David was working very hard on Long Beach, and I was working hard on Anaheim. We were keeping our eyes on the prize.”

Malmuth had a year’s head start before Eisner decided to pit the two projects against each other. But Hunnewell’s project caught up fast. Sometimes the two men would be called to a Burbank conference room where together they would be asked to describe parts of their projects directly to Eisner and Wells. Other times, Hunnewell said, Eisner would buttonhole them in the hallway of the company’s Burbank headquarters for a quick update.

Instead of reporting to their immediate supervisors, Malmuth said, he and Hunnewell reported directly to the company’s top brass because “we were closer to it than anybody else. I think they felt it was important.”

Malmuth said he met with Eisner and Wells about a dozen times during the course of planning for the Long Beach project. But he said neither revealed much of their personal feelings about the respective projects.

“I didn’t know how they were weighing the various elements,” Malmuth added.

All was going well until a major hurdle developed in the Long Beach proposal: Disney needed legislation to grant an exemption from the state Coastal Act that would have allowed the company to fill in 250 acres of ocean.

Environmental groups seized on the Disney bill as setting a dangerous precedent that would open the floodgates to similar requests from other developers. Malmuth said that, in retrospect, he should have contacted environmental groups first before pushing for the bill.

“No question. If I had to do it over again, I would spend more time with the environmental community,” he said.

Robert Sulnick, executive director of the American Oceans Campaign, which opposed the Disney plan, agreed that environmentalists should have been contacted. “As a matter of policy, when business needs to do something, they need to consult with the environmental community.”

The scope of the Long Beach project was severely limited by the inability to fill in the bay. Malmuth’s planners tried to reconfigure it to fit on the existing land, but it just didn’t work. He said he felt Disney’s interest started slipping at that point.

In the past two weeks, he said, Eisner and Wells kept their distance from the planners. By then, Malmuth said, he was reporting directly to his immediate superiors, development Senior Vice President Kenneth Wong and President Peter Rummell. Eisner and Wells could not be reached for comment.

During those same two weeks, Anaheim Mayor Fred Hunter said that members of his negotiating team were telling him that compromises were becoming easier to obtain in the closed sessions with Disney negotiators.

Last month, city sources said that Disney had initially expected the city to raise up to one-third of the total cost of the project, or $1 billion. The city reportedly made a counteroffer of more than $600 million. This week, the figure was reported at just under $1 billion.

City Manager James Ruth said city staff members were meeting with Disney negotiators nearly every day this past week, with some discussions carried over in late-night telephone calls.

“They (negotiators) were coming to us saying that everything was looking good,” Hunter said. “They felt our chances were good. That was about the time when Jack Lindquist called to invite us over for a meeting Thursday morning.”

Council members said Lindquist called Monday to say he wanted to update them on the project’s status, but many suspected the outcome.

“Basically, everybody knew this was too big a project for something to go haywire by us saying something. It was time for nobody to say anything,” Hunter said.

And they didn’t.

When Hunter arrived at Disneyland just before 8 a.m. Thursday, Lindquist said similar meetings were taking place with Long Beach officials. But those in Long Beach did not share in the jubilation that quickly spread through the theme park president’s spacious office.

“There was a great deal of excitement,” said Lindquist, who was joined that morning by Hunnewell and Dominguez.

“Jack (Lindquist) had a smile from ear to ear,” Hunter said. Lindquist quipped that Hunter was wearing the same grin when he left Disneyland that morning.

Hunnewell called it “smile transference.”