City Council opts out of secret meetings

Jennifer Kho

COSTA MESA -- The City Council on Monday ended subcommittee meetings

with C.J. Segerstrom & Sons after residents said they feared the

possibility of dishonest dealings on the Home Ranch project.

“I see no value in continuing,” Councilwoman Karen Robinson said. “If

there is such a tremendous amount of public distress about the process, I

don’t want to be associated with this. They should be able to trust us.”

Home Ranch, a 93-acre project originally scheduled for Planning

Commission review last year, was redesigned to add housing and to reduce

building heights and the square-foot density of the proposed office

space.

The modified proposal for the site -- a lima bean farm bordered by the

San Diego Freeway, Fairview Road, Harbor Boulevard and Sunflower Avenue

-- calls for a 308,000-square-foot Ikea furniture store, 791,050 square

feet of office space, 252,648 square feet of industrial business and 464

homes.

Segerstrom officials said in May they are also willing to make further

changes to build high-quality, single-family townhomes or condominiums

instead of high-density apartments.

Normally, the developers work with city staff and the city attorney to

draft a development agreement, which the City Council then reviews and

decides on after public hearings.

Motivated by a messy negotiation process between the city and

Commonwealth Partners LLC, which has lasted for more than a year and is

not yet complete, the City Council decided to try including two council

members and two planning commissioners to weigh in on the negotiations.

The hope was the council members and planning commissioners would

bring up controversial issues about the project earlier in the

discussions, council members said Monday.

“The City Council started this in good faith, but it is obvious the

public has suspicions that something very dishonest is going on,”

Councilwoman Linda Dixon said.

Former Mayor Sandy Genis began the discussion about the subcommittee

negotiations, leading a charge to persuade the council to open the

meetings to the public.

Genis said she was not allowed to watch the subcommittee meetings and

was also restricted from seeing a city attorney report concluding that

the law does not require the meetings be open to the public.

“So the meetings are secret, and the reason the meetings are secret is

a secret too,” she said. “I would just like to state my rejection of this

attempt to keep the public in the dark on this issue.”

Segerstrom spokesman Paul Freeman said he doesn’t think the change

will affect the project.

“Instead of having elected officials involved in drafting the

development agreement, now we’ll deal with just the attorney and staff,”

he said. “The result will be exactly the same. The only difference is

that, ironically, in voting to abolish this because of the closed-door

nature of it, now it will be completely behind closed doors and, at end

of the day, it will be completely the same. I was not expecting it, but I

understand the concerns that were raised, and I have no bad feelings.”

Resident Robin Leffler said she would have preferred for the council

to open the meetings to the public rather than take themselves out of

them.

She said she is happier with the decision than she was with the closed

subcommittee meetings, however.

“This is the last big project in Costa Mesa, and I am more comfortable

with this,” she said.

If two council members worked on the negotiations, “I think there is

the possibility that they’d feel invested in the agreement that came

out,” Leffler said. “When you work on something like that, you might feel

you came to an agreement that was the best for everybody and might not

feel comfortable voting against something you helped conceive. These are

intelligent and savvy people, and I don’t distrust them, but I’m more

comfortable with an open process.”

The council voted 3 to 2, with Councilmen Gary Monahan and Chris Steel

dissenting, to end the Home Ranch subcommittee meetings.