Competing With San Diego Firm for Project : Birtcher Banking on a Local Advantage

It is a rare billion-dollar corporation that can claim to be a neighborhood business. Birtcher, a family-owned firm competing against a team of San Diego developers for San Juan Capistrano’s downtown redevelopment project, is hardly one either, but it certainly is being treated as one by many residents.

“If I’ve got a shoe store in town, I’ll buy there. I always shop local,” said Mike Darnold, explaining why he urged the city’s Redevelopment Agency to award the multimillion-dollar project to the Laguna Niguel-based Birtcher, whose founder and top executives are longtime San Juan Capistrano residents.

“Their jobs are outstanding, I know them personally,” Darnold said, “and they’ve got to drive by (the proposed project) every day.”

Corner Development Store

Birtcher, the country’s ninth-largest commercial development firm with projects worth $1.3 billion under construction or in planning phases, somehow has managed to portray itself as San Juan Capistrano’s friendly little corner development store, even though its corporate headquarters are in Laguna Niguel.

While they are not among the town’s oldest families--others trace their roots back to the Juaneno Indians of the Mission era--the Birtchers have established themselves as an influential presence there.

The company’s founder, now-retired Fayette E. Birtcher, settled in town in 1960. He shares a three-home, six-acre compound in San Juan Capistrano with his two sons, Ron and Art, both of whom are general partners, and their families. Ron’s son, Brandon, who also is a top company executive, recently purchased two adjoining acres on which he plans to build a home.

The Birtchers also are prominent in the area’s religious community. Ron Birtcher is an elder at a Presbyterian church, while Art Birtcher is a Catholic who chaired the San Juan Capistrano Mission’s fund-raising campaign for a new church and donated the peal of eight bells that now crown it.

Supported School

He also has supported a local Episcopal school, St. Margaret’s, and a local community health clinic for low-income patients, and is co-chairman of a fund-raising drive to build a new Catholic high school in the southern part of the county.

The family compound includes a private chapel they call Rancho de Dios. Art Birtcher said his daughter, Wendy, was a week away from becoming a novitiate in the Dominican order when she decided to stay with the company as assistant vice president in charge of acquisitions.

“I think if we have a man like that who’s devoting his life to the betterment of the community, then we should honor that and let him continue that work in the core,” Canon Ernest Sillers, founding headmaster of St. Margaret’s School, said at a recent public hearing at which about 15 merchants and residents asked that Birtcher be awarded the project.

The family prays in town, and it also makes a profit there. Birtcher (then known as Birtcher Pacific) built the city’s--and south Orange County’s first--industrial park in the early 1960s, and one of the town’s earliest office complexes, Birtcher Plaza, on Camino Capistrano.

“We take a great deal of pride in the town,” Brandon Birtcher said. “It’s an island in Orange County . . . where you can enter the town and then three blocks later, you’re out of it.”

Not Always a Good Example

But the family company hasn’t always set a good example of preserving small-town charm. In 1964, the Birtchers bought and tore down Casa Grande, an 80-year-old mansion that belonged to the Forster family and at the time housed the popular Las Rosas Restaurant. A bank opened in the building erected in its place, and a law newspaper currently occupies it.

“That never would have happened today,” said Brandon Birtcher, explaining that community preservation standards back then were not what they are now. “And I don’t think you can blame us entirely--it was done under a mutual agreement between residents, authorities and the company. It was approved.”

Neither residents nor city officials have made an issue of the Casa Grande incident during the competition for the redevelopment project against the San Diego-based team of Oliver McMillan and Collins Development.

While the Birtchers are banking on their local reputation to help land them the project, Dene Oliver of Oliver McMillan, who is heading up the competing team, has sought to downplay the home-team argument.

“I hardly think that an hour’s drive makes a disadvantage,” Oliver said, referring to his location in San Diego County. “Besides, we develop outside of San Diego, and Birtcher is not only in San Juan. Their hotel group (J.W. Colachis Resorts) and retail group (Diane Powers, who operates Bazaar del Mundo in San Diego) are not San Juan-based.”

Much Larger Company

In fact, said Oliver McMillan partner Paul Buss, Birtcher is a much larger company with more widespread, national interests than the San Diego group, which operates mostly in Southern California and Arizona.

“What is really going forth is not a . . . popularity contest,” Oliver said. “Both teams have been determined to be highly capable. . . . But there has been an attempt to make it a political decision rather than one on merits.”