Sphere issues up in the air

When the Newport Beach City Council considers a first-of-its-kind agreement with Orange County tonight, a number of issues won’t be part of the package.

City officials have been negotiating the “sphere issues” agreement since late 2003. On Friday they were finally able to release a draft of the pact, with the main provision giving the city veto power over plans to expand runways at John Wayne Airport. In return, the city would agree to make its land-use plans around the airport consistent with state goals — something the updated general plan does — and agree not to annex any of the airport’s property.

The agreement also provides for studies of resources in the Upper Newport Bay and administration of services in the Lower Newport Bay, it gives the city $500,000 of county money to develop a park at Mesa Drive and Birch Street, and it says the county won’t prevent the city from scrapping plans for an equestrian and bike trail in Santa Ana Heights.

Three months ago, City Manager Homer Bludau said, the city-county agreement was 25 pages long. The pact the council will vote on tonight is seven pages.

A number of issues were taken off the table during discussions, but city officials said they expect to revisit most if not all of them. Only the timing was off.

For example, the city and county talked about Newport taking over the Santa Ana Heights redevelopment agency, which diverts most of the area’s property taxes into a fund that pays for improvements such as the neighborhood fire station that is now underway. But that’s not in the agreement, and it was probably the city’s biggest disappointment, Newport Beach Assistant City Manager Dave Kiff said.

What happened? When county staff brought supervisors a report on all the redevelopment agencies in Orange County, supervisors opted to take a comprehensive look to see whether the agencies could be closed down.

That study is pending, so the issue was pulled from the Newport agreement for now.

Barbara Venezia, who chairs the committee that represents Santa Ana Heights residents, has supported a city takeover of the redevelopment agency. She said she’s not upset that it’s been postponed because the county was proposing to give $20 million of the agency’s $40 million to the city.

“We have redevelopment agency projects to the tune of $36 million that have already been approved,” she said. ‘The county’s feeling, as I could see it, was that the city can borrow the additional money.”

Kiff said redevelopment agency changes could be brought up in the next few months, and he predicted supervisors will find it tough to close the Santa Ana Heights agency because it contributes about $2.7 million a year to pay off the county bankruptcy debt.

Early on, officials also talked about a Newport takeover of the Coyote Canyon landfill, which is owned by the Irvine Co. and operated by the county.

That fell away because of a legal dispute over future ownership of the land, and Kiff said it may stay on the back burner.

More recently, the city hoped to become the trustee of the Newport Dunes, state tidelands that are held in trust for the public but not owned by Orange County. The city would still have turned over $2.3 million a year that the county now collects from the dunes’ operations.

“The advantage to the county was no headaches, they just get a check; and our advantage was we get to maybe be a bit more responsive to our residents who complain” about noisy events at the dunes, Kiff said.

Finally, the city was interested in gaining stewardship of the Back Bay, which Kiff said was “kind of an innocent request [that] totally blew up in our face.”

County employees who work in the Back Bay’s interpretive center worried about their jobs, and environmentalists questioned how well the city would do with no experience handling such a resource.

How best to manage the bay will be part of a city-county study that is a term of the agreement.

If the council approves the agreement tonight, county supervisors are expected to discuss it Oct. 17.