City Hall showdown

Looking into Newport Beach’s attempt to build a new city hall is like peeling an onion.

Each direction explored by city officials has raised an outcry from some part of the community, and each suggested location has come with complex layers of considerations and costs.

After more than two years of serious study, the City Council today is faced with as many as four choices of where to build, and none is a slam dunk.

And it’s not yet clear how the issue will be decided — by a City Council whose members are bitterly divided on the question of location, or by voters whose opinions range from passionate to oblivious.

“Your everyday guy on the street, I don’t think he knows where City Hall is in the first place,” Central Newport Beach Community Assn. President Louise Fundenberg said.

But among those watching the issue, tempers have flared, especially in recent weeks, and two Council members have resorted to questioning each others’ leadership in print.

Council mulls

new civic center

It started in 2005, when — after an earlier study had shown city workers needed a more spacious, modern facility — the Council began considering designs for a new civic center on the Newport Boulevard plot where City Hall now stands.

A small but vocal group questioned the need for facilities it said would cost as much as $100 million by the time financing was paid off, and the Council finally opted to look at other locations.

Enter Bill Ficker.

An architect and former America’s Cup-winning sailor, Ficker is a respected community member and something of a legend. His proposal to build a city hall on property that was slated as a park in 1992 but remained undeveloped since then was, to some, the most logical option.

A Council-appointed committee was tossing out most of the suggestions for city hall spots because they were unbuildable or not for sale, while the park parcel is large and city-owned. It’s presently an uneven patch of ground that rises far above street level in some places and is crossed by ravines in others.

But Ficker immediately raised the hackles of environmentalists and park boosters, who urged the Council not to forsake a promise that the land would be a park “in perpetuity.”

As City Councilman Ed Selich said in July, “If you’ve got two sites that work equally well, why would you pick one that destroys a park?”

Ficker said his only agenda is to help the city find the best place for its buildings and to create something Newport can be proud of. He’s puzzled by what he sees as the intransigence of park supporters.

“We ought to be able to sit down and discuss it and compare notes,” he said. “Any discussion about how it could be good for the community has just been cut off.”

Ficker won over some of the Council but not enough. Four of seven votes have been in favor of going ahead with the park. But Ficker thought the Council was making a mistake, so in May he took the next step and filed papers to put the issue before voters.

That persistence, to Councilman Keith Curry, was a gauntlet.

Curry has aggressively promoted the park and pursued a spot down the street from it — an Orange County Transportation Authority bus terminal — for city hall. He and Mayor Steve Rosansky, who backs Ficker, traded barbs in newspaper columns, and they’ve had spats on the dais.

“I think our side would say this issue was debated many, many times in front of the Council,” Curry said. “We need to make a decision as a community and move on.”

A history

of strife

But when it comes to a new city hall, moving on is something the city seems to have been unable to do for years.

A volume on Newport Beach history published in 1988 describes this debate in the early 1970s: “Complaints that the east side of the city was becoming another Beverly Hills rose to screams of protest when City Council members suggested relocating City Hall from 32nd Street in Central Newport to Newport Center. A $6.9 million bond issue to do just that failed in 1971.”

The city at that time was in a transitional period, and residents pondered “whether we wanted to be a big modern city versus a quiet beach community,” former Mayor Evelyn Hart said.

While some wanted to move City Hall, “there just wasn’t the necessity in the average person’s mind,” she said.

In the 36 years since the city hall bond issue failed, the city grew up. Land has become scarcer, more expensive and thus infinitely more precious — and that may have helped raise the stakes in the current debate.

Each of the sites now under discussion presents its own problems.

For example, the bus terminal — until recently, the leading contender — would require relocation of the bus facilities; the city might have to buy parkland to replace what it would lose by building on the park parcel next to the library; under the latest proposal to lease from the Irvine Co., the city would build a facility on land it doesn’t own; and city workers would have to move off-site for as long as two years if City Hall were rebuilt on the peninsula.

But the discussion has gone beyond a simple debate about where to put a building. In an Aug. 6 comment on the Newport Beach Voices blog, an unnamed poster commenting on a newspaper column by Rosansky noted, “Stay tuned. This ugliness will get uglier.” Rosansky, whose column was a reply to an earlier one by Curry, wouldn’t describe the debate as “ugly.”

“I would say it’s heated,” he said. “At this point a lot of it’s probably gone past that to ego and ‘I’ve got to win.’”

The high-toned debate cooled a little last week, when Curry made a public apology for anything he said or wrote that may have been out of line, but emotions are still strong on the issue.

Council watcher Dolores Otting said Council members have shown a lack of respect for the public as well as each other. “I’ve never seen it elevated to this level at the Council level,” she said.

“I’ve never seen council people that as soon as people are done talking just insult everything that everyone said because they don’t agree with them.”

Curry offered this explanation: “Our side would say it’s gotten this way because the other side refuses to recognize the democratic result of many other decisions,” he said. That’s not unusual for Newport Beach, where there’s a history of citizen activism that bubbles up when a group of residents decides the elected officials are taking the wrong path. Hence Ficker’s ballot measure, and the citizens group that’s opposing it.

Of winners

and losers

If there’s a loser in all this, Ficker is determined it won’t be him. He said he doesn’t feel anyone has personally attacked him for what he’s trying to do.

“When we vote on this, if the community turns it down I’m not going to feel like I’ve wasted my time,” he said. “If somebody finds a better site, won’t that be wonderful?”

Instead, it could be the current Council that ends up tarnished. To some, the sniping and inability to reach consensus has made the institution of city government look bad.

“To me it’s evolved into calling into disrepute the entity known as the City Council,” said former Mayor Tod Ridgeway, who was a part of the City Hall discussion until he was termed out in 2006. “This community is quick to forget most things, but personally, the seven personalities on that Council — there’s no pulling them together.”

But another former mayor, Dennis O’Neil, disagreed that the city hall issue has split the Council irreparably.

“I went to USC, and sometimes UCLA beats USC at football — it’s not life-threatening to me,” he said. “There is a disagreement on this particular issue, but that doesn’t mean they can’t work together.”

As to that better site Ficker mentioned, some think it’s been staring them in the face all along. Councilwoman Nancy Gardner wrote in her August newsletter, “I have been getting a steady stream of e-mails from people who can’t understand why we’re ignoring the current site,” and several other council members said they’ve been hearing the same.

While the promise of a park next to the library has been brought up often, some people point out an earlier council promised not to move City Hall off the Balboa Peninsula. Fundenberg, of the Central Newport Beach Assn., sums it up: “I just don’t want the peninsula to be a forgotten place. After all, we were the city until we annexed all these other people.”

It’s difficult to forecast how political winds will shift, particularly with the latest possibility — Irvine Co. property on Newport Center Drive at San Nicolas Drive — added to the mix. That newest site raises questions about whether the city should put a multi-million dollar building on property it doesn’t own, even with a long-term lease.

With all that in mind, and adding construction time, it’s unlikely there will be a new city hall before 2010. The city has to negotiate for either the bus center parcel or the Irvine Co. land, and the latter will involve discussions about a range of things the Irvine Co. wants from the city.

If the ballot measure qualifies, it won’t be voted on until February, and if it passes, another vote probably would be needed to satisfy the Greenlight law. If the council sticks with the current location, they may need a new design for the building. Some residents and council members were less than impressed with what they were shown in 2005.

Some residents are sick of the debate, but others meet it with cheerful resignation, like Fundenberg.

“Something’s going to happen, and some of us are going to like it and some of us aren’t going to like it, and that’s the way life is,” she said.