City hall faces new delay on site review

The Newport Beach City Council’s Tuesday decision to reconsider the police station site as a possible new home for city hall means another delay in the project.

Further study of the police station on Santa Barbara Drive will take at least two to three months, so the city hall discussion could become a campaign issue for council candidates.

The city has been exploring a possible new city hall for four years but plans keep getting stalled. In 2005 the council was considering a $48 million civic center ? including a rebuilt city hall, new fire station and parking garage ? on the current City Hall site on Newport Boulevard.

But residents said other places should be considered, so the council studied nearly two dozen of them. They were moving toward the original location again when a proposal to build on property next to the city’s main library aroused public interest.

Some people liked the plan, proposed by architect Bill Ficker, because of its central location. But others complained that the site had been promised as a park since 1993 and the council had rejected it as a city hall destination last fall.

The council listened to park supporters Tuesday and took the park site off the table again, in a 4-2 vote with Mayor Don Webb and Councilwoman Leslie Daigle dissenting and Councilman Dick Nichols abstaining.

Then, rather than voting to build on the Newport Boulevard site, the council decided to look again at the four acres that houses a police and a fire station. It was No. 3 on a list of 22 sites that were studied, but it was rejected earlier because it didn’t meet all the city’s criteria.

One problem was that the police station would have to be reconfigured, and the council was then only looking to build a city hall, said Councilman Ed Selich, who suggested reconsidering the site.

Now, council members may look at several options, he said: building a police/fire/city hall complex, or buying a vacant 3.2-acre site nearby, building a police station there first and putting a city hall where the police station now stands.

The council’s vote also left the option of revisiting other Newport Center addresses, but Selich doesn’t expect those to get serious consideration. For example, the No. 2 site was one owned by the Irvine Co., which didn’t want to sell ? but several council members have said they’re unlikely to support taking it by eminent domain. Eminent domain gives municipalities the authority to buy property at market value if it’s in the public’s best interests.

Selich and Webb agreed Wednesday that discussions of the library park site showed them that people want the council to try to find a viable place in Newport Center.

“This is a decision that’s going to be with the city for a lot of years, and if we can work something out to where we can put something in the Newport Center area, it would be so much better for the city in the long term,” Webb said.

Five council members will be running for their seats in November, and this latest delay may allow them to avoid making a potentially unpopular decision before then. But Webb said the council’s decision Tuesday wasn’t politically motivated.

“I don’t believe any of us did it because of that. The more you get into these various different issues, the more you learn,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t make the right decision the first time around.”

The council’s three-member building committee will likely meet next week to talk about next steps in city hall planning. Webb said choosing any place other than the existing City Hall site could add one to two years to the project, because any other location would likely require a public vote.