BETWEEN THE LINES -- Byron de Arakal

While noodling on the nasty and bloody Koll-Greenlight crackup that’s

looming just around the bend, it occurs to me that the interests involved

have been particularly inattentive drivers in their blinkered

determination to get to their respective destinations. And when the

tangle of metal occurs, I’m thinking it will be an event precipitated by

a failure to yield.

First, some context. Pending before the Newport Beach City Council is

a proposal to expand the Koll Center Newport campus with the addition of

a 10-story office tower and a pair of parking garages. On the drawing

boards since 1997, the 250,000-square-foot project would occupy the

finger of real estate at the northeast corner of MacArthur Boulevard and

Jamboree Road.

Now, in the next lane over and oncoming at a sizzling clip is the

juggernaut known as Greenlight, the citizen-written ballot initiative

passed in November that has planted an 800-pound gorilla squarely in the

middle of this city’s planning and development regime. Greenlight --

which was vigorously debated in a good old-fashioned campaign scrap --

requires the citizenry to cast an approving vote of any project that

exceeds the parameters of the city’s general plan by 40,000 square feet,

100 peak-hour car trips or 100 dwelling units.

As of now, the Newport Beach City Council has twice approved the

development agreement governing the Koll project, and is slated to grace

it with a final blessing at the council’s July 24 session. And that has

Greenlight leaders in a lather. It’s their beef that the project all but

ignores both the intent and spirit of the Greenlight initiative. To some

degree, I agree with them.

By my reading of the development agreement -- when measured against

the letter of the slow-growth initiative -- the soldiers of Greenlight

appear to have a point on several fronts. The most glaring of these has

to do with traffic effects. The project’s environmental-impact study

warns that the Koll project will “have significant long-range adverse

traffic impacts on four or five major intersections” in and around the

project.

The environmental report further concludes that the mitigation of

these effects “could be significant.” Indeed, conceptual plans sketched

together by the city suggest that access ramps and a grade separation at

the MacArthur Boulevard-Jamboree Road intersection will do the trick. But

the price tag is pegged at between $15 million and $20 million. That’s

not beer money.

Now it’s fair to fling some measure of credit Koll’s way for

volunteering to write a $2-million check in addition to the $1.16 million

it must pay in mandatory fees to help fund these traffic improvements.

But it’s who gets stuck with the balance of the tab that troubles me.

Mostly, it’s the city and “other property owners” in the area.

There is a raft of other gaping holes in the development agreement --

too many to chat about in my allotted spot -- that make me think the city

did indeed fail to yield, perhaps unintentionally, to the spirit of

Greenlight. Which of course has invited the wrath of the initiative’s

followers, who vow to defeat the project at the ballot box.

But it seems to me that the shadowy Greenlight committee, whose

spokesman is the ever-present Phil Arst, failed to yield to a spirit of

cooperation that should have prevailed between the group, Koll and the

city during the entitlement process. Rather than do that, Arst said the

Greenlight committee intentionally remained silent and uninvolved.

“We wanted to see if the City Council would heed the voters and

clearly they have not,” Arst said. “They’ve flunked the test.”

That strikes me as a strategy without honor, one that seeks to delight

in the role of spoiler rather than participate in the process as a

partner. And it now leaves the City Council to guess what the Greenlight

committee will accept when a project emerges from the entitlement

process. Most troubling, it puts an exceptional amount of power in the

hands of an informal ad hoc tribunal accountable to no one.

It’s for precisely these reasons that I couldn’t get behind Greenlight

in November, even though I understood its intent.

But because it is now the law of the land, it seems to me the city and

Greenlight’s soldiers would do better if they stopped circling each other

like a pair of jacked up roosters in a cock fight. The city and the

development community owe Greenlight some respect by not bringing

projects to the table that are outside the box. At the same time,

Greenlight’s people should stop lurking in the tall grass waiting to

shoot down projects as they clear the tree tops. They should instead haul

their bodies down to City Hall and speak up.

Absent either, we’ll continue to see these two sides fail to yield to

one another in the planning and development future of the city. And the

collisions won’t be pretty.

* BYRON DE ARAKAL is a writer and communications consultant. He lives

in Costa Mesa. His column runs Wednesdays. Readers may reach him with

news tips and comments via e-mail at o7 [email protected] .