http://www.ocregister.com/articles/council-536849-city-historic.html

“A historic night,” Irvine Mayor Steven Choi called it when on Tuesday the City Council began taking up the matter that had drawn hundreds to City Hall. Historic night turned into a historic morning before it was finally decided at 1:20 a.m. Wednesday that history-making would have to wait at least two weeks.

In hindsight, there was little or no chance the modified Great Park plan was going to be approved this week. I can’t help but think that someone with a grasp of the mechanics of such things should have realized that and spared everybody eight of the most tedious eight hours of their lives by either acknowledging it up front or, better, setting up the meeting to succeed in the first place.

Historic? It was a historic disservice to the public.

The meeting started at 5:10 p.m. The place was so crowded that fire marshals had to remove spectators from the aisles. They spilled into the foyer, where they could watch on a monitor. You had everyone from soccer tots to tennis pros, enviros to business leaders. Attendees included former major leaguer Bobby Grich and former USC star Anthony Davis, the latter of whom, bless his heart, stayed until the final gun.

Yet for the first two hours, the council dealt with relative minutiae such as a proposed project at anotherpark. This is not unique to Irvine’s City Council. But given the main topic of the evening – and it truly ishistoric – and what else I’m about to lay out, you’ll see how this two-hour delay played a role in the debacle.

It was 7 p.m. before the city staff began presenting the proposal by developer FivePoint Communities to build 688 acres of the Great Park – nearly half of the park – in exchange for being allowed to build 4,606 homes in an area in which FivePoint only had a right to build commercial projects. The value to the city would be about $200 million.

There were four separate components the council had to approve: the contract with FivePoint to build the park, a zoning change, a general plan amendment and the environmental impact report.

The staff’s presentation lasted two hours. There were a lot of fine deal points and unanswered questions, which the staff thoroughly noted. But there was also rehash, things that everybody already knew. The night was slipping away.

Around 9 p.m., FivePoint CEO Emile Haddad and his staff finally got to put on their presentation. It lasted 40 minutes. The City Council members then spent eight minutes arguing over whether they or the public were going to speak first. The public won and finally got to come on about 10. Choi had 55 people wanting to speak. I stopped counting at 35. It was 11:45 before everybody was done.

Then Councilwoman Beth Krom got the microphone, followed by each council member. Each was allotted 25 minutes, although not all of them took it. But suffice to say we were well into Wednesday before the real bombshell dropped.

The council to this point had only discussed the developer contract, which was complex enough. It had not even opened the EIR, which runs around 1,200 pages. Not only that, but City Attorney Todd Litfin told the council it should not approve the contract until it had done the other approvals, starting with the EIR.

What???

Who wants to start digging into a 1,200-page EIR at 1 a.m.? After eight hours, the only bigger travesty than being in the position of having to postpone the matter and sending everybody home would have been to attempt to plow on. So the council majority picked the lesser of two evils and decided to revisit it in two weeks.

Could a deal have been struck Tuesday? Maybe if they’d started the meeting at 4 p.m. as they sometimes do and cleared the agenda of all else; maybe if they’d gotten the order of business right; maybe if everyone had trimmed their presentations 20 percent; and maybe if the parties could agree to eschew discussion of three big, time-sucking red herrings that have little to do with the core deal. The red herrings: the Musick Jail, the location of a high school and Broadcom’s new headquarters.

Note that I haven’t discussed the underlying issues and why I believe that even had the EIR been properly approved, there would not have been a deal struck. And why that could still be the case in two weeks. But that’s another column.