Chula Vista Project: City at a Crossroads : Waterfront: The proposed complex of hotels, stores and apartments is so massive it could overwhelm the city.

CHULA VISTA —  This city is at a critical juncture. In the months ahead, its leaders will decide whether it is going to grow up gradually, with a mix of developments that would retain its homey, small-town character, or whether it will become a totally different city during the next 20 years, with the new high-rise waterfront development now being proposed by Chula Vista Investors.

Chula Vista is still a relatively small town, with a population of 135,000. Its waterfront is a mixture of shipyards, industry and expanses of marshland, with a few new tourist-oriented uses. Its downtown, only a few blocks to the east, consists mostly of one- and two-story buildings, with only a handful of taller structures.

The proposed 20-year, $500-million bayfront development would radically transform the western end of the city with apartment and hotel towers ranging from 9 to 22 stories, retail shops, offices, a 36-court tennis center, a 250-seat theater, an ice skating rink, landscaped parks and two man-made lagoons on 130 acres at the edge of San Diego Bay between E and F Streets.

To accommodate the intense development the city would have to approve a new Local Coastal Plan and an amendment to the city’s General Plan.

There’s a lot going for the project: Architects from the Jerde Partnership, the Los Angeles company that designed the new Del Mar Plaza shopping center as well as Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego, have created a preliminary scheme that looks like a winner in terms of design and planning.

But, assuming the developers can get past the many hurdles being placed in front of them by environmentalists concerned with the quality of water in San Diego Bay and the welfare of a variety of birds and sea animals, the question is whether such a large project is appropriate on this bayfront site.

If the project is approved, will Chula Vistans look back with regret in 10 years, as some San Diegans already do over their own intensely developed waterfront?

William Barkett, 32, executive vice president of Chula Vista Investors, is spearheading the bayfront proposal. In the past, the company has developed hotels, apartments, offices and retail projects in a variety of California cities. Barkett is confident this project, his company’s first major mixed-use effort, addresses the important issues of environmental impact, public access to the waterfront, traffic flow and preservation of bayfront views.

“Nothing’s being destroyed, everything’s being enhanced,” he said during an interview in his La Jolla office.

By phone from Los Angeles, architect Carl Worthington of the Jerde Partnership elaborated on the design.

“If you think about Chula Vista as a city, it has, say, 400 acres of contiguous land along the bay in this location. What we’re trying to do is create a waterfront community by using only a small portion of it, and preserving precious wetlands.

“A typical neighborhood east of Interstate 5 on 400 acres has one- and two-story buildings that cover 21% of the land, with maybe 5,000 people. What we’re doing is putting about 5,000 people in this small, pedestrian-oriented village. The density isn’t much different, it’s just clustered in a much smaller area (the high-rises).

“Most of the developments done these days are only single use--residential, shopping, office, entertainment. More and more, we’re finding we have lost the fabric in our cities, because we’ve taken the pieces that want to be together and pulled them apart.”

Worthington gave some sense of the architectural flavor the project would have.

“We want a stucco appearance on the towers. The windows would probably be smaller than full window walls, reducing the amount of glass and reflectivity so the project has maximum compatibility with the wildlife preserves nearby.

“The architecture would give a very soft, Mediterranean kind of ambience, with warm, pastel tones on the buildings, probably tile roofs, arcades, arches. It would be like going into an old European village, with entertainment streets, restaurant streets and a market, in addition to the residential neighborhood.”

The bayfront project would have significant benefits to the citizens of Chula Vista: access to new waterfront parks on land that is now unusable, new shops, restaurants, a theater, an ice-skating rink and a tennis center.

In exchange for such intense development, the developers also promise to restore the marshlands surrounding their project that have been damaged by both agricultural and industrial abuse. They would dredge them, replant and remove assorted debris. Pedestrians and bicyclists would travel past the scenery on new paths that would include educational kiosks describing the marsh habitat.

In addition to the 47.8 acres of parkland and open space the project would include, Chula Vista Investors already donated 300 acres of marsh land north of the site to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

The project would include 1,400 residential units in three towers and low-rise buildings around a man-made lagoon north of E Street, 1,800 hotel rooms in five hotels surrounding another man-made lagoon south of E, plus a 40,000-square-foot conference center and 150,000 square feet of office and retail space.

Make no mistake, this is a large project: 3.8 million square feet worth. For comparison’s sake, it is more than twice as dense for its site than either Seaport Village or Coronado Shores, the high-rise condominium development just south of the Hotel del Coronado, according to a draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) prepared by Keller Environmental Associates of San Diego.

Chula Vista has been trying to land a project to revitalize its waterfront since the early seventies. An earlier proposal made by a partnership of the Santa Fe Land Co. and Watt Industries fell through after a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club helped prevent the developers from building on the D Street Landfill and Gunpowder Point, areas immediately to the north and west of the present site.

Instead of redesigning their project, the original developers sold the land in 1988 to Chula Vista Investors, and the new developers re-directed their efforts to the south of the forbidden 300 acres, which they donated to the city.

Chula Vista will be tempted by the prosperity the developers are promising, including an eventual $15 million per year in new tax revenues and $300,000 a year that could flow to the nearby Chula Vista Nature Interpretive Center through a special tax assessment.

The proposed project’s tremendous height and bulk ought to be setting off some alarms, but Chris Salomone, the city’s redevelopment director, said he doesn’t think height and bulk will be the major concerns as the project works its way through city hall this spring.

“I think we would acknowledge the trade-off for the height. It is an appropriate site for height to make the project an asset to the city and to work economically. We might ask that they move the buildings back from the bayfront a little, to free up the park areas.”

Other cities have made the mistake of walling off their waterfronts with high-rises. Along Harbor Drive in downtown San Diego, the new convention center and high-rise hotels block the bay from public views and access. After new, intensive development occurred in downtown La Jolla during the 1980s, residents rallied to speak out for preserving the character of their seaside village. In Coronado, many citizens have never forgiven their city’s leaders for the high-rise, ocean-front condominiums built next to the Hotel del Coronado during the 1970s.

But Chula Vista’s is an entirely different case. This is a rundown, unused bayfront site, not a pristine seashore or an inviting waterfront recreation area. Given competition from other area cities that have better natural settings, Chula Vista may have to allow greater intensity to lure a developer.

The plan is not without detractors: New Mayor Gayle McCandliss and City Councilman Tom Nader are among those who have said they think this project is too intense. Environmental groups including the Sierra Club and the Environmental Health Coalition have expressed strong reservations about the project’s potential environmental impact.

A draft environmental impact report was issued last summer, and the city has been analyzing 165 comments received from assorted citizens and environmental groups during a 45-day public review period. A final EIR is due Feb. 1 for review by the city’s staff, and in March will be considered by the Chula Vista City Council and Planning Commission. And because this is a coastal project, it must also be approved by the California Coastal Commission.

If the development goes ahead, the key to its success will be the spaces between the big buildings--the people places--and the degree to which the public actually has access through the project to the waterfront and the new recreation features.

It’s just hard to imagine this small town as a high-rise tourist mecca, or to picture residents who enjoy the village-like atmosphere of their city being pleased with such a monumental, tourist-oriented waterfront development.