Irvine Council Majority Calls Park Study Greatly Exaggerated

A study that shows transforming the mothballed Marine base at El Toro into an urban park could generate as much as $10 million a year in profits is misleading, premature and overly optimistic, according to those who commissioned the $60,000 review.

A majority of Irvine council members not only challenged the survey’s findings but expressed such rage over the report being made public that they met late Friday and censured the person who released the document--Councilman Larry Agran.

Agran, who has made the “Great Park” a cornerstone of his mayoral campaign, said he decided to release the document because it “has extremely good news in it.” He said taxpayers paid for the study and ought to be allowed to see the results.

The study concluded that most of the revenue generated by the park would come from leasing housing and other buildings on the 4,700-acre Marine base. Additional money would come from concessions and agricultural leases, the study states.

Councilman Dave Christensen dismissed the report’s glowing financial estimates as “misleading junk.”

The Great Park proposal is the third plan to percolate from South County as an alternative to the county’s intent to build an international airport at the base. Irvine has planning authority over about 440 acres of the base, though it has proposed annexing all of it.

The other non-airport plans--each offering a different percentage of parkland, new homes and commercial development--are variations of the Millennium Plan, which has long been backed by the nine-city South County anti-airport coalition.

Several key South County leaders have withheld support for the Great Park out of concern that a hefty taxpayer subsidy might be needed to cover costs.

And at Friday’s three-hour meeting, the council voted unanimously, with Agran refusing to participate, to formally rebuke him for releasing the report. Council members criticized the analysis as incomplete and said Agran released the document prematurely to promote a slate of council candidates on next month’s city ballot.

Agran argued the report is a thorough analysis that shows the park plan would pay for itself. He said the county has hidden bad news from its own consultants in the past.

“That we should be in the business of hiding good news is equally deplorable,” he said.

But his colleagues said Agran’s release of an unreliable report is exactly the reason the county has lost credibility on the airport. Many of the county’s rosy predictions for El Toro have been called into question--including its air-pollution and noise analyses--and it has lost critical support from a skeptical public, they said.

“Anything we say to the public has to be accurate,” Councilman Greg Smith said. “We’ve got too much at stake here and our credibility is priceless in this fight.”

The Great Park findings are suspect, council members said, because the consultant’s estimate of revenue from future leases is based on an analyst simply driving by the buildings, without taking a look inside. It is difficult to know the condition of many of the structures, or even if they contain asbestos or some other problematic substance, Councilman Mike Ward said.

Further, the report set base maintenance costs at $4.5 million a year--the same amount the county now pays for using only a portion of the base on a limited basis.

Ward said that last month, he asked the consultant, Whitney and Whitney of Los Angeles, to revise the figures, but nothing was changed.

The report also didn’t consider city actions that might affect income, including leasing space at little or no cost to nonprofit groups or subsidizing houses for city workers, Smith said. The city provides 16,000 square feet of space to nonprofits.