Mission Viejo, a City on Move

After years of renting, Mission Viejo has become a homeowner.

City leaders in this quintessential master-planned community packed up and started moving Thursday from their second-floor rental deep in a sprawling office park to a $14.5-million City Hall in the center of town. The front doors will open Monday.

The 52,000-square-foot contemporary mission-style structure is the centerpiece of a civic center on the southwest corner of Marguerite Parkway and La Paz Road--a bustling intersection that is as close to a downtown as Mission Viejo has to offer.

City officials say the new digs should give the city of 100,000 residents a more focused identity.

“‘City Hall’ is a nebulous term,” City Manager Dan Joseph said. “But it gives people something tangible to refer to.”

It also gives people something they can actually find.

The old City Hall was tucked behind a strip mall in a nondescript office complex on the northwest edge of the city. If not for a few signs that pointed the way, City Hall could have passed for a real estate office.

“We didn’t even have a lobby to welcome the public,” said Karen Wiley, the city’s spokeswoman.

“The elevator wasn’t big enough for a gurney,” Wiley said. “A woman was having a baby and she had to sit up while she was in labor.”

Since incorporating in 1988--two decades after people began moving into the subdivisions that went up on an old cattle ranch--the city has been a renter. On Monday, 15 months after groundbreaking, the front doors to City Hall will be tossed open and the city will become a landlord.

City Hall consists of two floors of office space, a 165-seat council chambers--twice the size of the old one--a community room that doubles as an emergency operations center and office space for fire and Orange County sheriff’s deputies.

Thirty yards across a courtyard is the library, which is expanding by 14,400 square feet. There is a community and senior center down the road.

In 1992, residents of Mission Viejo overwhelming rejected a proposal for a City Hall, which seemed extravagant for a 4-year-old city. In 2000, voters went the other way and approved a scaled-down City Hall.

And to date, the only grumbling about the new civic headquarters has been whether there will be enough parking.

“This was a bedroom community, a suburb,” Mayor Susan Withrow said. “You can walk down the sidewalk and get to a lot of city services now I think we’ve done a pretty good job of creating a downtown where there wasn’t one.”

On Thursday, as boxes and crates were carted from the rented offices, city employees said the move was far from being a sentimental journey.

“We’ve lived in the apartments,” Joseph said. “Now it’s time to move into a house.”