What makes Marinapark different

Stephen R. Sutherland

I am writing to answer reader’s questions printed today in the

mailbag section of the Daily Pilot regarding the Marinapark Resort

and Community Plan.

Barbara Johnson of Newport Coast asked: Why would people choose

this resort when they can get to the Hyatt and Hilton resorts in

Huntington Beach, or the Montage and Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Beach or

the Balboa Bay Club.

First, the Hyatt and Hilton in Huntington Beach are business and

convention hotels, not destination luxury resorts. The Hyatt has 517

guest rooms with 110,000 square feet of convention and meeting space.

The meeting space alone is larger than the total square footage of

the Marinapark Resort, including the new Girl Scout house and

Community Center that we are building on the site as part of the

resort construction.

The Marinapark Resort does not have any business or meeting space.

Our 3,600 square foot ballroom, smaller than many Newport homes, will

be used for small intimate weddings, anniversaries and other

celebrations. Many of these events will be for local residents, who

will enjoy what will be Newport’s only waterfront bay view ballroom

with family and friends.

The Dana Point Ritz-Carlton is a 393-room hotel with approximately

50,000 square feet of meeting and banquet space. It too, is mainly a

business hotel. The majority of guestrooms at the Balboa Bay Club

have views of the main courtyard, the parking lots or overlook Coast

Highway. Although Laguna’s Montage is about three times the size of

the planned Marinapark Resort, in style and quality it is the closest

match on the coast.

The closest match to the Marinapark Resort is the 100 room Hotel

du Cap Antibes. This is, and has been, one of the world’s finest

small luxury resorts. Just like the Marinapark Resorts peninsula

location, Hotel du Cap is located on a peninsula in Antibes, France.

By the way, Antibes is Newport’s Sister City.

To answer the question; why would they choose this resort? For

those wanting a true luxury resort without being disturbed by the

computers and cell phones of businesspeople and conventioneers, this

is the one and only choice.

Johnson’s final question about why city staffers bring projects

that make no sense is puzzling. If Johnson can recall just a few

short years ago, the same group of “anti-everything” people that

oppose my resort fought hard to stop the development of Newport

Coast. In fact, just a little more than a year ago, Greenlight

co-founder Allan Beek fought to stop the City Council from annexing

Newport Coast into the city of Newport Beach. The same group that is

trying to stop my little resort on the bay is angry that your home

was ever built. This is a known fact that was covered by the Pilot.

Your criticism of city staffers indicates that instead of taking the

Newport Coast annexation to the city council, they should have taken

orders from Beek and not worked on annexation.

Resident and CoastKeeper activist Randy Seton asked how I will

address and promote the water quality in that area of our bay. I have

known Seton for close to 40 years and have great respect for his work

to improve the quality of the bay.

When we remove the 58 trailers that currently occupy the

Marinapark site, we will also remove the 58 above ground sewer

hook-ups there. Next we will grade the 8.1-acre site so that it

drains into large underground concrete vaults that our civil

engineers have designed to catch and skim runoff from the site before

it enters the storm drains and goes into the bay. This includes the

capacity to catch the first 3/4 inch of new rainfall at any given

time and treat it before it enters the bay.

Current conditions put everything on the site right, smack into

the bay. This alone is a huge improvement for water quality from this

site. Next we have designed a system that will relieve the storm

drain system when we have serious rainfall and related flooding on

this part of the peninsula. Instead of allowing water from this

8.1-acre site to go right into the overburdened storm drain system,

as is currently the case, we will use pumps attached to our

underground vaults to pump runoff water from our site into our

subterranean garage and store it until the storm system recovers.

This will have a positive effect on water quality.

Residents with questions are welcomed to call me at (949)

757-1662, or e-mail [email protected].

* STEPHEN R. SUTHERLAND is the developer for the Marinapark

Resort.