Council Debates Taking City Hall Issue to Voters

The City Council again debated Monday night whether to ask voters if they want an $18-million City Hall.

The civic center site is located off Crown Valley Parkway near Interstate 5. The city wants to rent about a quarter of the proposed 80,000-square-foot building to a governmental agency, such as the county, and nonprofit organizations.

About $600,000 has already been spent to draw up plans for the civic center and other development costs. The money was borrowed from the city’s general fund and will be paid back when the building is financed through bond sales, city officials say.

Officials also are quick to note that the money will be lost if voters decide not to go ahead with the civic center plans.

A local political group, the Citizens Action Committee, has been organizing to defeat the proposal since last summer. Likening the civic center plans to a “Taj Mahal,” the group has criticized the city’s plans as too extravagant and last week turned in a 5,198-signature petition to force the issue onto the November ballot.

Chairman Gary Manley said the city had several lower-cost alternatives, such as purchasing and converting an existing office complex.

“It’s a perfect time to steal a building because nobody can sell one these days” in the currently depressed commercial real estate market, said Manley, a real estate agent in Mission Viejo. “We’re really opposed to all the money it will cost to build a City Hall from the ground up.”

But city officials say constructing a City Hall from scratch is the only way to provide certain badly needed services, such as a police substation and an emergency center to handle disasters.

Purchasing a building and renovating it to suit the city’s needs would also be expensive, city officials said.

“These are not grandiose, pie-in-the-sky plans,” said Councilwoman Susan Withrow, who headed a committee that studied the civic center issue. “For what we’re getting here, $18 million is not a lot of money.

“And we need a City Hall, there’s no getting around that. If we’re going to build one later, it’s going to cost a lot more.”

The Citizens Action Committee questioned the council’s recent interest in putting the City Hall issue to a vote after showing no interest in the proposition for the past several months.

The group also objected to the ballot language proposed two weeks ago by Councilman Robert A. Curtis, who also called for the election results to be advisory. The petition turned in by the Citizens Action Committee calls for a binding election.