Thank all our supporters for an amazing couple months. With the unanimous support of the City Council, the $176 million sports park proposal now heads to the Planning Commission for a formal vote on October 24.

Don’t forget to tell your friends and neighbors to sign-up to support Build the Great Park Now.  We will let you know the next time we need your support so we can get the job done.

See the article in today’s Orange County Register about the upcoming vote:

FivePoint Communities made its first public pitch to the city’s planning commission last Thursday to build 4,606 homes east of the Orange County Great Park and a representative for the developer urged the commission to move with haste though at least two commissioners questioned the rush.

“This team has missed nights, weekends and holidays for two years,” said Patrick Strader, who represents FivePoint, looking back at several more of the company’s staff sitting in the council chambers.

FivePoint first applied in December 2011 for a zone change, general plan amendment and environmental review to build the houses.

No action was taken Thursday and it won’t be until a public hearing scheduled for Oct. 24. Another discussion in-between on Oct. 17 will compare FivePoint’s proposal to build out several hundred acres of the Great Park and the park’s original master plan.

Before FivePoint could get to its presentation, which included a video of its latest Pavilion Park development set to Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” with the lyric “we’ve come a long, long way together,” the commission debated how quickly they should move forward in considering the proposal.

FivePoint had wanted a public hearing on Oct. 17, but staff needed more time to review documents plus enough time – 15 days for public hearings — to allow for public notices published in this newspaper and the Orange County Register. If the meeting proceeds on Oct. 24, it still allows enough time for the City Council to consider it by its Nov. 12 meeting. If it doesn’t, it would likely be delayed into 2014, Strader said.

Commissioner Mary Ann Gaido wanted the commission’s public hearing moved to Nov. 6, because she will be out of town for the Oct. 24 hearing.

“This is probably our last planned neighborhood,” she said, calling the consideration of the plan a “historic moment,” and recalling Ray Watson’s original dream of creating a city of villages. That dream is coming to fruition, she said. “We won’t be doing this again.”

Commissioner Nancy Neudorf said she also didn’t understand the hurry. “I’m uncomfortable being asked to move faster on this,” she said. “We definitely need all five of us to make the good decisions we make.”

FivePoint’s staff looked up state and local municipal codes on laptops and phones in the audience while the commission wondered if Gaido could participate in the meeting remotely. She can, and may, so the hearing date remained Oct. 24.

“I would have loved to have this meeting on Oct. 17,” said commission chair Anthony Kuo during the meeting.

“We owe the developer and the community a hearing, at the very least,” he said in an email later.

The prospect of losing one of Irvine’s largest employers, Broadcom, as the tech company shops for a new headquarters was also a reason mentioned by Kuo and Commissioner Greg Smith to justify moving quickly.

“I think it’s important to note that this application was submitted in December 2011,” Strader said. As far as the occasion being a milestone, he reminded the commission that the planning commission’s public hearing wouldn’t be the end to the process. “This is not by any means the final approval on this project.”

Thank you letter published in the Irvine World News.