Santa Ana Tower Has Early Lead

A proposed 37-story-high office tower near downtown Santa Ana appeared headed for approval in a city referendum late Tuesday.

Early tallies showed votes in favor of the project, which would be Orange County’s tallest building if constructed, leading by nearly 15 percentage points. The registrar of voters said a total was not expected until late.

Developer Michael Harrah, who gathered with supporters at his downtown restaurant, Original Mike’s, said he felt confident of victory.

“This is a great beginning of new vertical development in Orange County,” said Harrah. “There is no way to spread out. Orange County will grow up, and Santa Ana will be in the forefront of that development.”

Opponents assembled at the home of Paul Giles and held onto hope but also looked ahead.

“No matter what the result, it is clear we need to revise our planning process,” said Giles. “We can’t let developers come in and write it for us.”

Harrah raised nearly $370,000 to support Measure A, which asked voters to approve One Broadway Plaza; its opponents collected less than $45,000.

The City Council approved the $86-million glass office building in July, but opponents of the project rallied and gathered enough signatures to force a special election on the issue.

Critics of One Broadway Plaza, many of them from neighboring French Park, say the tower would be grossly out of proportion with their one-story historic homes and others that surround the site, at 10th Street and Broadway. The neighborhood, near downtown, was originally zoned for three-story buildings not to exceed 35 feet, but the city approved a variance for One Broadway Plaza.

Supporters say the project will spur the local economy and restore some luster to Orange County’s old commercial hub.

The debate has dominated city politics for months, growing heated at times.

On the eve of the election, Councilwomen Lisa Bist and Claudia Alvarez took a moment at the end of the City Council meeting to laud the project.

Alvarez alleged that project opponents were telling Latino residents that federal immigration agencies were to occupy the tower, the opponents’ apparent attempt to draw support for their cause among the city’s large immigrant community. Opponents vehemently denied Alvarez’s assertion.

Alvarez herself was the target of conflict-of-interest accusations by project opponents for receiving $3,200 in contributions from Harrah before voting on the project. Alvarez said she was told by the city attorney that there was no conflict of interest because the money was for her failed run for state Assembly.

The debate is one of the city’s most contentious in recent memory. Before polls opened Tuesday, 10,641 absentee votes had been cast. The hotly debated recall of Nativo V. Lopez, a Santa Ana Unified school board member, drew 13,600 total votes in 2003.

Both sides campaigned heavily. Opponents walked for months door-to-door to tell residents that One Broadway Plaza would create traffic congestion. To fund their campaign, they conducted garages sales and sold valuables, and one man said he had refinanced his home to help support the campaign. Students from nearby Orange County High School of the Arts protested the project Friday, saying the greater traffic would make walking to campus dangerous.

Union officials put their support behind Harrah, showing up at City Council meetings, holding placards and urging members to vote yes.

On Saturday, Bist tooled around town in a car decorated with YES slogans to drum up support for the tower. Mayor Miguel A. Pulido, who had to abstain from voting on the project because a former business partner does business with Harrah, made his position public with appearances on political ads that ran on a Vietnamese-language television station and on local-access television to support the project.

The City Council scheduled the special election for Tuesday because the next city election is not until November 2006. The election cost the city $225,000, officials said. There were 33 polling places, about one-fourth the number during regular elections, and no other measures or candidates were on the ballot.

Harrah, who initially proposed a 60-story, 800-foot-high building, sued twice to try to block the referendum after opponents gathered more than 14,000 signatures to force the vote.

Harrah has maintained that his project would be a signature building to draw high-profile tenants who over the years have preferred to set up shop in Irvine and Costa Mesa.

He said One Broadway Plaza would be occupied by a Fortune 500 communications company that would gain naming rights for the building. Smaller tenants in the 512,000-square-foot building would include law firms and other businesses, he said. He declined to name the prospective tenants.

Harrah owns 3 million square feet of commercial space in more than 60 buildings in downtown Santa Ana, the tallest of which is 12 stories high. He also plans to open a 500-seat performing arts theater June 1 near downtown.

The project opponents said their campaign was a referendum not only on a building, but also on city government.

“People want their elected officials to listen to them. They don’t feel they can be heard,” said Jeff Dickman. “The City Council approved this without taking their views into account.”