What Irvine Really Lacks Is a Sense of Irony

The Northern Sphere sounds like a restricted area where the government might be investigating extraterrestrials. Instead, it’s a large tract of unincorporated land that Irvine plans to annex as the future site of more than 12,000 homes, which will complete the city’s grand design for itself over the next 20 years.

City Hall and the Irvine Co. think the Northern Sphere should be celebrated as another master stroke of planning. They are irked that a small group of citizens--who just happened to serve on a task force that studied the project intimately--have rained on their parade by saying publicly that the project is too big for Irvine.

Methinks the council has no sense of irony.

Isn’t this The Little City That Could? Isn’t this the city that, in the face of two countywide votes in the 1990s approving an international airport, led the fight to undo the whole thing? Isn’t this the city that begged for people to take another look--and then another and another--at the potential effect of an airport on the local scene? And when lots of people touted the inevitability and eminent sense of a new airport and lamented that the issue had been studied to death, didn’t the city stand strong and ask for more time?

The answer to those questions is obvious, and I don’t hear the band of Northern Sphere questioners arguing any differently than City Hall once did over the airport. True, an airport is not a housing development, but the loyal opposition to the Northern Sphere project is merely asking for more time.

At least, it was. The City Council has settled the matter and approved the project, and the only intrigue is why its supporters seem so indignant at the protests over it.

Mayor Larry Agran, the original back-bencher, says that the “overwhelming” majority of city residents supports the project. When I asked if, once upon a time, he wouldn’t have been the person raising questions about a project of this scope, he replied: “No.”

The mayor continued: “I always in the end voted yes, even on some of the most expansive development projects. My goal always was to secure maximum public benefits in conjunction with any private benefits we were conferring on the Irvine Co. or other developers.”

Clearly miffed that the media have given the anti-Northern Sphere group as much ink as it has gotten in recent days, Agran says of the project: “Rather than it being a hurried process, it has been a protracted and thorough process, by design.”

He points to the 55 meetings open to the public on the subject over the last couple years. Many of those were the task-force meetings, but others, he says, were more conventional “town hall” settings.

Agran argues that if widespread opposition to the plan existed in Irvine, it would have surfaced. I can’t disprove that but question whether in the face of the decade-long anti-El Toro airport fight, Irvine citizens focused on the Northern Sphere.

I talked to two citizen members of the task force. Neither wants to junk the Northern Sphere plan. They question only its size and whether Irvine residents really grasp what it will mean.

“The seven of us who were on the task force have just given up, saying we can’t fight City Hall,” Richard Deskin says. “Our basic gripe is that we don’t mind the project, we just think it’s overdeveloped.”

As a personal matter, it’s of no-nevermind whether the Irvine Co. builds out Northern Sphere. I just find it curious that the demurring of a group of citizens--especially a group that knows it well--is incurring such wrath.

Mayor Agran says it’s just that--a group of citizens not reflective of the city.

That’s what El Toro airport advocates once said of their opponents.

“People don’t see how big this beast is that’s going to be in their backyard,” says Deskin of the proposed development.

Even as I can imagine him shaking his head in disagreement over that statement, I swear I hear echoes of it in Larry Agran, once upon a time talking about an airport.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons at (714) 966-7821, or at dana.parsons@latimes.com.