Developer to Get Site for Original Price Despite Deal’s Critics

The Pasadena City Council has decided that developer Danny Bakewell’s company will not pay more for a city-owned site for a proposed supermarket shopping center in the community’s economically deprived northwest area, despite critics’ charges that the $1.5-million price tag is about half the property’s value.

Monday’s late-night vote came after a nearly three-hour hearing in which supporters said the project will reduce blight and bring amenities to a neighborhood that has traditionally been neglected. Opponents, meanwhile, called the Fair Oaks Renaissance Plaza deal a gift of public funds and an illegal windfall for Bakewell’s firm.

The council voted 5 to 2 to stick with the price agreed on with Bakewell’s firm in September 1994, while approving changes to the agreement requested by the developer, which include replacing a requirement that Vons will stay for 20 years with one that allows it to assign the lease to another major supermarket. Council members William E. Thomson Jr. and Ann Marie Villicana dissented.

More than $11 million has been spent by the city to buy the land and relocate businesses once on the site at the southwest corner of Fair Oaks Avenue and Orange Grove Boulevard.

Bakewell will pay for the site over 20 years with no initial payment and $157,000 due in five years, and will borrow $6 million from a bank to build the center. Bakewell agreed Monday to complete the project by October 1997.

“They can expect a legal challenge. Under the law they had to charge Bakewell more,” said Thomas Parrington, a real estate attorney and critic of the agreement.

City consultant Allan Kotin told the council that the changes in the agreement would not affect the site’s value. However, at the direction of the city’s staff, he said he did not consider other factors, such as the fact that Bakewell’s firm is now getting as much as $1 million more from the Vons lease than originally expected in 1994.

Kotin conceded the true value of the site measured by the same standard used in 1994 “would be $2.5 million or I don’t know what it would be.”

Resident Mark Pickell, a real estate consultant and critic of the deal, said that his own studies show the site to be worth $2.5 million to $3 million.