St. Andrews plans to build

Church to stay within City Council’s space limits for expansion; plan for 150 new parking spots nixed.St. Andrews Presbyterian Church officials plan to shift some facilities and possibly eliminate others so they can build a youth and family center without adding to the church’s overall square footage.

The new plan, which was to be announced to the congregation at services today and Sunday, is a change in direction for the church but comes as a relief to church neighbors, who fought expansion at St. Andrews for 2 1/2 years.

Church officials originally asked the city of Newport Beach to approve a nearly 36,000-square-foot expansion that included a youth and family center with a gymnasium and a parking structure. Neighbors vehemently objected, claiming the church’s existing 104,000-square-foot facilities already created nuisances of noise, traffic and parking overflow onto residential streets.

At the behest of the planning commission and the City Council, St. Andrews gradually whittled its proposal, but it still wasn’t small enough for the council, which in August voted to limit the expansion to 15,000 square feet.

After several months of meetings, church leaders decided to remodel so the youth and family center can be added without increasing the church’s overall size, said church building committee chairman Ken Williams. They’ll also scrap plans for a 150-space parking structure.

Williams said several issues led to the decision: The smaller amount of square footage allowed by the city actually increased the cost of the project, which could have approached $30 million, and the council attached a laundry list of conditions to the expansion, including occupancy limits the church doesn’t now have to observe.

“When we were forced to cut down from 21,741 [square feet] to 15,000 [square feet] that night in the meeting, that caused us to sit down and rethink the whole thing. And the more we rethought it, the more we ended up in this direction,” Williams said.

Church officials still have to work out how they’ll fit the youth center into their existing square footage. Williams said he expects the congregation to have mixed reactions but to ultimately support the decision.

Perhaps almost as important is the response from neighbors, who bitterly fought the expansion.

“We’re pleased about what we see on the surface, but it’s, rather, a guarded sense of relief,” said Don Krotee, a resident of Newport Heights.

Cliff Haven resident Bill Dunlap agreed, saying the remodeling concept sounds good but he’d like to see exactly what the church has in mind.

Dunlap, Krotee and Williams all said they are eager to begin mending the damaged relationship between neighbors and the church.

“A lot of people [in the congregation] have been extremely concerned about the gulf that’s developed between ourselves and our community, our neighbors, and they will look forward to this as a way to bridge that,” Williams said.