The Best-Laid Plans

Alex Coolman

NEWPORT BEACH -- The amber taillights line up in the evening gloom

like a string of rubies, a pair of brake signals for each commuter

sitting in the congestion of West Coast Highway.

It’s not an encouraging sight, especially if you happen to be sitting

in the middle of it. And it’s scenes like this, day after day, that have

some critics of new development in the city saying enough is enough.

More building will bring even more traffic to congested areas such as

Coast Highway, they say. The string of rubies will grow until it twists

itself into glistening knots of gridlock.

But developers such as the Evans Hotels company, which wants to build

a resort hotel at Newport Dunes, counter with a simple, powerful reply:

The projects they hope to build are allowed in the city’s general plan, a

document that spells out Newport’s vision for future growth and

development.

Although the developments will bring additional traffic to the area,

they won’t bring any trips that weren’t agreed upon in that document,

adopted almost 12 years ago.

That simple fact that the development has been anticipated for years

by the city’s planners should, they contend, be enough to persuade

residents that everything will eventually work out for the best.

It sounds pretty reasonable, pretty straightforward. But whether or

not it sounds like an intelligent response to the problem of growth in

Newport Beach depends on one’s level of confidence that following the

city’s plan will make for a pleasant future.

To some critics, the notion that the general plan will protect the

city from overdevelopment sounds more than a little naive. You only need

to watch the flashing taillights, they say, to get a different picture of

where the city is heading.

A SIMPLE PLAN

Susan Caustin, co-founder of the group Stop the Dunes Hotel, which

intends to support a referendum against the 470-room hotel and

31,000-square-foot conference center project if it is approved by the

City Council, said a major problem with the plan is it seems to get

reworded to accommodate the demands of big developments.

“We don’t seem to stick with the general plan that much,” she said.

“It’s more of a guideline.”

The proposed Dunes project, Caustin says, is a case in point. It’s

taller than the version of the development permitted in the planning

guidelines. And its conference center was never mentioned in the original

specifications for the project.

But the Dunes is hardly the only development that pushes the

boundaries of the plan. City records show that entitlement for Fashion

Island expansion was increased by 266,000 square feet in 1994; the Four

Seasons Hotel room was allowed in 1998 to add 100 rooms more than the

plan allowed; and Corona del Mar Plaza in 1995 both boosted its square

footage entitlement and managed to change its land usage designation from

a governmental/educational classification to one for retail and

commercial space.

“You only have to look as far as Westwood or Century City to see what

happens when a general plan is altered and altered and altered,” Caustin

said. “You end up losing all of your open space, and the only place to go

is up.”

BEST-CASE SCENARIO

On the other hand, the fact that a development is somewhat different

from what is specified in the city’s plan does not necessarily make it a

bad thing for the city.

Planning Commission Chairman Ed Selich has argued that the Dunes

project, as it now stands, is superior to that specified in the general

plan. If it weren’t, he said, he wouldn’t support it.

For one thing, the project should theoretically generate fewer traffic

trips than the one originally proposed. Instead of 3,989 daily trips

produced in the old plan, the center would add only 3,600 to the flow at

Coast Highway, said Rich Edmonston, the city’s traffic engineer.

“That [old] project doesn’t meet the needs of the city, the needs of

the community or the needs of Newport Dunes,” said Robert Gleason, a

spokesman for Evans Hotels.

Development is also important from the perspective of revenue, and

though it might be easy to dismiss a project because it doesn’t follow

guidelines strictly, it’s not so easy to dismiss the tax money the

project might generate.

“Revenue shouldn’t be the first thing on the list of criteria” used to

evaluate a development, said Councilwoman Norma Glover, “but it should be

high on the list.

“I would love to sit down [with development critics] and say, ‘You

tell me what kind of city you want, and I’ll tell you what kind of

revenue we need to run this city,’ and I’ll tell you where we meet. And

that should be our plan.”

STICKING TO THE PLAN

A more challenging issue has to do with the way Newport Beach will

look -- even if no alterations are made to the planning guidelines --

when it reaches its projected maximum density.

Although all of the available land is allocated for one use or

another, not all of it is as dense as could be.

“The general plan is going to allow another 20% for what’s already

there,” Caustin said. “For every person [in Newport Beach today], you can

add another one.”

Patricia Temple, the city’s planning director, said she could not

confirm the 20% figure cited by Caustin, but she noted there is still

plenty of room to grow.

“The existing development on the ground is not not generally maximized

based on what the general plan allows,” she said. “We have

intensification potential in most of our older on-street commercial

districts.”

Areas that could become more dense, Temple said, include Corona del

Mar, Mariners Mile, Old Newport Boulevard, Campus Drive near the airport

and regions on the Balboa Peninsula.

What that means in terms of specific traffic levels is hard to

predict. By 2010, the city expects to see 972,049 daily trips generated

from within the city, a figure about 21% higher than the 1996 level. But

these numbers do not include traffic originating outside of the city.

THE CRYSTAL BALL OF TRAFFIC

How precise these numbers are is tough to say. Planning models in

general are only somewhat accurate, and Temple said traffic planning is

particularly complex.

“They are not absolutely guaranteed, rock-solid predictors of what’s

going to happen in the future,” she said. “It’s all based on a very long

chain of estimates and assumptions about what’s going to happen.”Add to

that built-in vagueness and, the additional modifications that tweak the

limitations of the general plan, and only one thing seems absolutely

certain: The Newport Beach of the future will be bigger, denser and

trickier to get around.

You can plan on it.

FYI:

Some of the projects from the last decade that have obtained general

plan amendments:

* Newport Beach Library, 1992, entitlement increased by 15,000 square

feet

* Pascal Restaurant, 1993, entitlement increased by 1,080 square feet

* Fashion Island, 1994, entitlement increased by 266,000 square feet

* PacTel, 1994, entitlement increased by 90,600 square feet; land use

redesignated

* Temple Bat Yahm, 1996, entitlement increased by 40,000 square feet

* Four Seasons Hotel, 1998, 100 rooms added to entitlement

Source: city of Newport Beach

***

FYI:

Total trips generated per day within the city of Newport Beach.

1996

803,498

2010 (projected)

972,049

Total increase in trips: 21%

Source: city of Newport Beach