Legal fees waived in amphitheater dispute
Danette Goulet
COSTA MESA--A long-running dispute over noise at the Pacific Amphitheatre
finally has been settled, with two women getting off the hook for $52,000
in legal fees.
The Orange County Fair and Exposition Board agreed Friday to waive the
legal fees that a court ordered Costa Mesa residents Jeanne Brown and
Laurie Lusk to pay in return for their agreement to drop an appeal
stemming from the theater’s use.
“We’d been talking to them for some time and we were anxious to [settle
it] before spending a great deal of time on fighting an appeal,” said
Donald Saltarelli, fair board president. “The board never really wanted
to hurt these ladies financially.”
For Brown and Lusk, the fight goes back to the 1980s, when the concert
venue was owned and operated by the Nederlander Organization and huge
concerts rocked the neighborhood.
Shortly after the theater opened in 1983, complaints and lawsuits from
its neighbors began flooding in, prompting the Orange County Fair to buy
the facility for $12.5 million in 1993.
In 1995, the fairgrounds sued Nederlander, saying it sold the concert
venue while it knew that sound restrictions on the facility rendered it
useless.
When the fair filed suit against Nederlander, Brown and Lusk sided with
the concert promoter in a bid to ensure that the noise restrictions
remained intact.
Before a jury decided the case, Nederlander and the fairgrounds reached a
reported $16-million settlement. That left Brown and Lusk, who wanted no
part of the settlement, possibly holding the bag for the plaintiff’s $4.3
million in legal fees.
“What we wanted was for someone to monitor [the noise],” Brown said.
Superior Court Judge Robert Thomas ordered the two women to pay $45,872
in attorney’s fees and $5,800 in court costs, which they had been
previously ordered to pay. Friday’s settlement relieved the women of
those financial obligations.
The city of Costa Mesa agreed Thursday that if the amphitheater were to
be used again, it would monitor any concerts and enforce Orange County’s
noise ordinance through August 2023, said Richard Spix, the women’s
attorney.
The cost of monitoring will be paid by a $100,000 fund set up by the
Nederlander organization, he said.
“We’re very pleased that it’s over with and we’re happy that the city is
going to take over the responsibility should they have concerts there
again,” Brown said. “I’m sorry that it took this long and this many
appearances in court.”
Although it is unlikely that the amphitheater will reopen, Saltarelli
said the fair was left with the noise restrictions that were always in
place.
“It is unlikely that it can be opened. Certainly it can’t be reopened as
it is,” he said. “I think the only way to open it would be to put a cover
on it and that should solve our noise problems.”
The board now will begin a two-year process to determine how to
rejuvenate the entire fairgrounds, Saltarelli said.
A consultant is expected to be hired to study all the different venues at
the fairgrounds and set a new plan in motion that would reflect the
community’s wants and be finically feasible for the fairgrounds, he said.
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