Newport Considers Hotel Plan

A proposal to replace a decades-old American Legion hall with a luxury hotel has presented Newport Beach with a delicate Solomon’s choice.

Who do you emulate, J.P. Morgan or John Wayne?

On one hand, there’s Newport Beach’s long-standing reverence for free enterprise and money, and the lure of an estimated $2.8 million a year in city revenue from the proposed hotel.

On the other hand, there’s history, and the city’s equally defining sense of conservative patriotism as exemplified by both American Legion Post 291, founded in 1924, and Wayne, one of Newport Beach’s most famous residents before his death 20 years ago.

Lurking behind those competing options are the intangible benefits of leaving things as they are.

“They know what they have,” said Agnes Erickson, a resident of an adjacent 58-unit city-owned trailer park also threatened by the development proposal. “They don’t know what they’re going to get.”

The issue of what to do with the nearly 11-acre parcel surfaced this summer when local architect Stephen Sutherland proposed converting the publicly owned land into a hotel complex after existing 25-year leases expire in March.

The city’s response was to buy time. City Council members decided to seek alternative proposals for the site while extending the American Legion’s lease for a year. They probably will extend the trailer park’s lease too, Mayor Dennis D. O’Neil said.

“There are a lot of competing interests for the property,” O’Neil said. “We want to maximize the return for public property, but at the same time, we need to be aware that development can adversely impact the surrounding communities.”

Complicating the issue is the nature of the land itself. Much of the Balboa Peninsula was sculpted from dredged sand early in the century, and areas that were initially below the high-tide mark must remain available for public use, according to state codes.

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Newport Beach officials have been waiting for two years for a ruling from the State Lands Commission on whether the land beneath the trailer park originally was tidelands, and thus must be preserved for public use.

“Those uses generally do not include any type of residential uses,” said Curtis Fossum, senior staff counsel for the Lands Commission. “They have allowed hotels, restaurants, parks, beaches and those kinds of things that are open to the public.”

Although Fossum declined to discuss the Newport Beach tidelands issue directly, the scenario he described could jeopardize the residential trailer park even if the city rejects developing the site.

The site has been used for camping since the early part of the century, and over time it evolved into a mobile home park, which generates about $500,000 a year in rent to the city.

Ron Hein, whose 97-year-old mother lives in the park, recalls vacationing at the site in the 1930s when his family visited friends who kept a trailer there. Hein was back again last week from his Oregon home to tend to his mother’s affairs while she recovers from a fall.

“I think it’s stupid to propose some kind of $500-a-night, big-time thing here,” said Hein, a retired California state wildlife manager assigned to the Southern California coastal region. “It beats me.”

Sutherland said his hotel proposal would preserve public access to the area by opening a health club, yacht marina, tennis courts and playground accessible to hotel guests and city residents. Sutherland said the health club would be operated by Michael Talla, his partner in the proposal and founder of the Los Angeles-based Sports Club and Spectrum Club fitness centers.

“Our intention is to have a successful resort and to open the property to the public as much as possible,” Sutherland said. “The only off-bounds areas will be the interiors of the rooms and the swimming pool.”

Sutherland said the proposal also includes helping the American Legion, believed to be the only post in the country with its own yacht club, relocate to an unspecified waterfront site.

The proposal unleashed a steady stream of condemnations, with scores of people protesting at a City Council meeting and others filling local newspapers with letters to the editor.

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One resident, who defended the Legion as a good neighbor, said she believes replacing it with a hotel would do more harm than good to the upscale neighborhood.

“We don’t feel that it’s going to be anything that we’d be happy with,” said Bessie Meily, who has lived a few doors down Bay Avenue from the post since 1982. “We can’t see that it would be any better having all those people who would be coming for [a hotel]. It would not benefit the people from Newport Beach.”

Yet most of Post 291’s nearly 2,000 members live outside Newport Beach, post officials said.

The post was organized in 1924, originally in a building on 10th Street before a street-widening project in 1940 forced it to the city-owned location at the foot of 15th Street. Its cavernous hall--which looks like a massive World War II-era Quonset hut--has hosted weddings, retirement parties and other gatherings in the decades since.

Among the biggest events is Post 291’s annual Fourth of July celebration, which this year raised $15,000 for a veterans home in Barstow, post officials said.

On a recent afternoon Bill Gear, 62, of Encinitas and John Stromme, 65, of Costa Mesa enjoyed a midday beer in the post bar overlooking the harbor. Two other men played cribbage with the bartender as a group of three men talked quietly at the bar.

Gear, an Army vet, described the post as “the jewel in the crown” of Legion halls.

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“Either they’re going to raise the rent beyond what we can afford, or the place is going to be developed,” Gear said. “It’s just a constant worry.”

Stromme said the post is an oasis for vets.

“The average vet can come down here and not have to belong to the Balboa Bay Club and still have this nice view,” Stromme said, looking over boats bobbing at their moorings with the San Gabriel Mountains just visible on the horizon.

J.T. Tarwater, 57, a Legion vice commander who has monitored the hotel proposal’s progress, has an uncertain feeling about how the post will fare.

“I don’t know what the answer is going to be,” said Tarwater, a construction executive who lives near the post and keeps a boat in the Legion Yacht Club. “I just hope we stay here.”

That decision, though, lies in the hands of others.

“I’ve got nothing against this Sutherland guy wanting to cut a hog and make a fat deal for himself,” Tarwater said as he sipped a drink at the outside bar. “He’s got the right to try. . . . All we can do is fight. I’d just hate to see it all go away.”