Newport Beach : Bay Club Updates Members on Project

The nearly 4,000 members of the private Balboa Bay Club began receiving mail from board Chairman William D. Ray this week as the club continues its low-key campaign on behalf of its recently defeated expansion plan.

The four-page letter reviews the failed $60-million proposal and outlines four steps the club is taking to continue promoting the project, including looking into whether the city can hold another public hearing on the plan and meeting with local groups to discuss it.

“It’s just to keep in touch with the members,” said Thomas Wilck, president of the public relations company handling the letter-writing campaign. “They are (the club’s) supporters. What they’re seeing are headlines and news stories. It’s important to keep them in the loop.”

Last week, the Bay Club commissioned a citywide telephone survey to determine residential opinion on the expansion plan. That survey, which polled about 350 people, claimed that the club “is still favorably regarded in the community by a 2-1 margin,” according to the letter.

Some who received the letter perceived it as an attempt to erase bad feelings some members had about not being told from the start that the proposal was to include a commercial section--a 300-room hotel--that some members felt did not belong in a private club.

“I think that was one of their initial problems, they didn’t communicate with all the special interest groups, and I’m not sure they communicated their plans to the members,” said Kevin Green, a Bay Club member and president of the Bayshores Community Assn., a residential group that was instrumental in opposing the project.

The letter emphasized that the private nature of the club would be preserved. “The plan increased public access opportunities, but at the same time we have protected and greatly enhanced the private club facilities which make the entire plan feasible and exciting,” the letter said.

Green added that he felt previous discussion of the expansion plan in the club’s newsletter did not clearly discuss the hotel and that the club’s current publicity campaign is “a step in the right direction. I think that now they are on the right track.”

Along with the hotel, the club proposes adding a ballroom for 450 people, two cocktail lounges and a new athletic facility, all of which would be open to members. Developers had hoped to delay City Council discussion of the plan once they learned of public opposition, but the council went ahead with the scheduled public hearing and rejected the proposal, 4 to 3.