County OKs Trade to Get Mile Square Park Acres : Swap: Deal will preserve public area in Fountain Valley, give Marines a housing site and provide funds to the Irvine Co.

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday completed one of the biggest land swaps in county history, ensuring the preservation of a swath of popular local parkland in exchange for more military housing.

The county is paying the Irvine Co. a total of $33.2 million for two parcels of land in the Irvine area, then trading that land to the U.S. government for 137 acres in Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley.

County officials had sought for years to gain title to the parkland because they worried that the Marines would try to build military housing there. Now, the military can build housing on the new Irvine sites.

“For nearly 20 years I’ve looked forward to this . . . the culmination of the Mile Square Park acquisition,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Roger R. Stanton told his colleagues as they approved the agreement on a 5-0 vote.

The deal, nearly 15 years in the making, brings to a close a series of complex and tense three-way negotiations between the county, the Marine Corps and the Irvine Co.

The county is getting a triangular parcel in the very center of Mile Square Park. The Marine Corps used the site through the 1960s for helicopter training. But more recently, it has been leased to the county by the U.S. government on a year-to-year basis and used by the public for model airplane flying, marathons, fireworks, ballooning and other recreation.

Officials described the land swap as one of the biggest and most complex in the county’s history. It proved particularly impressive because the traded land was located not in forests or canyons--as in most recent deals of this type--but in the midst of areas that are largely developed, officials said.

“How often is 137 acres acquired for open space in the middle of an urban area?” asked Stanton aide Robert Richardson. “That’s very significant.”

Tuesday’s vote by the supervisors marked the second phase of the agreement.

In March, 1991, the county, the Marines and the Irvine Co. agreed to exchange title to part of the designated parcels, leaving an option to complete the transaction by this coming June. In its vote Tuesday, the county agreed to finish the deal by committing $16.8 million--much of it coming through state funding--for 25 acres of Irvine Co.

“We’ll be entering escrow within a week and hopefully close within a month,” Stella M. Oviedo, a senior agent in the real estate division of the county’s General Services Administration, said after the vote.

Officials from the three principal parties expressed satisfaction with the agreement Tuesday.

The county, by assuming ownership of Mile Square Park, escapes the fear of having the military put the area to non-recreational uses. The Marine Corps, in acquiring 41 acres in Irvine near its two county bases, gets land to build 400 housing units to help fill a desperate need for affordable local housing.

And the Irvine Co. gets an immediate cash infusion at a time when the local development market has been hurt badly by the recession.

“This was enormously complicated,” said Larry Thomas, vice president for corporate communications at the Irvine Co. “But this is one of those happy occurrences when we were able to work with two separate governmental agencies to gain a win-win situation for everyone.”

The process was often controversial. Talks began in 1977 after local Marine officials shocked the community by announcing that they wanted to build military base housing in the heart of Mile Square Park.

Stanton, then mayor of Fountain Valley, threatened to stand in front of any bulldozers that entered the park.

“We were finally starting to get this park developed . . . and all of a sudden we were going to have a housing development,” Stanton said Tuesday, recalling the shock of the Marines’ proposal. “Everything just busted loose.”

Since then, central points in the negotiations often have became clouded by new issues added along the way, stalling the talks, officials said. For instance, land owned by the Irvine Co. in Gypsum Canyon in the Anaheim area--where the county once wanted to build a jail--was actively considered as part of the swap, but that idea was dropped.

Also discussed was the county’s acquisition of 20 acres of U.S. land for creation of a new Interstate 5 interchange at Bake Parkway. Instead, negotiators decided to hold off on those talks until the Mile Square deal was done, officials said.

“It’s just been somewhat frustrating over the years to think we’re close” to an agreement, Stanton said, “and then we get locked on some peripheral issue.”

The sale price for the Irvine Co.’s two parcels of land in Irvine was also a source of sharp debate.

In the late 1980s, company officials said appraisals showed the land valued at $1 million an acre--or more than $41 million.

The final sale price of $33.2 million--including Tuesday’s agreement and the initial one a year ago--was roughly the amount of the county’s counteroffer, officials said.

“We think (county officials) got a very good bargain for themselves,” Thomas said.

But while Irvine Co. officials came down markedly from their initial asking price, they did secure one key condition in the deal: ensuring that the county acquired the land under threat of eminent domain. That lessens the taxes the company has to pay when it reinvests the proceeds, officials said.

Within the next several years, Marine Corps officials hope to complete construction of 400 housing units on their 41 new acres next to existing military housing.

Many of the new units will be reserved for lower-ranking personnel who must now wait two years or longer to get base housing. Capt. Pete Ciesla, a Marine community liaison officer at El Toro, said Orange County’s high rents often force local personnel to commute from Riverside or other distant locales to the bases at Tustin and El Toro.

Although the Tustin air station is scheduled for closure in 1997, Ciesla said the military will still face a critical need for affordable housing close to the El Toro base.

Meanwhile, county officials said they will study the best recreational use for the Mile Square Park land. But it seems unlikely the site will maintain its present form, with concrete slabs still remaining from its days as a helipad.

“It’s reasonable to assume, for the kind of money we spent (to acquire the land) that we need to get more revenue use out of that area,” said Robert G. Fisher, director of the county’s harbors, beaches and parks division.

He declined to say what recreational uses that might include, but model-plane flier Steve Schofro of Costa Mesa thinks he knows: another golf course, the third in the park.

Three-Way Land Deal Complete Tuesday’s action by the Board of Supervisors finishes a complicated series of three-way negotiations dating to 1977. The county is buying two parcels of land, covering 41 acres, in the Tustin-Irvine area from the Irvine Co. for $33.2 million. It will then swap the land with the federal government for 137 acres in the center of Fountain Valley’s Mile Square Regional Park.