NEWPORT MUSEUM PROJECT UP TO VOTERS

The Newport Harbor Art Museum wants to move ahead on a major structural expansion, but museum officials say a controversy over Newport Center commercial developments--headed for an electoral showdown on Nov. 25--is keeping the museum’s own project at a standstill.

The museum’s proposal to build a new and larger home is part of an overall $300-million Newport Center expansion that the Irvine Co. seeks for the firm’s commercial showplace in Newport Beach.

But that plan--geared chiefly to huge new office, retail and housing developments--is strongly opposed by a citizens’ slow-growth coalition that claims the commercial developments will generate massive traffic congestion. The Nov. 25 vote will be a citywide referendum on whether to approve or reject the Irvine Co.’s Newport Center plan.

While coalition leaders maintain they oppose only the commercial developments--not the museum expansion--Newport Harbor Art Museum officials argue that the Nov. 25 outcome will have sweeping impact on the museum.

If city voters approve the Newport Center plan, the museum’s design and fund-raising studies could be completed early next year, said museum director Kevin Consey in an interview. Construction, he added, could then start by early 1988 on the larger new museum, now projected to cost $20 million.

If the overall Newport Center plan is rejected, the museum’s major expansion will have to be shelved at least another year, Consey said. “It (voter rejection) would mean a whole new ballgame. It would mean starting our (expansion) evaluation all over,” he said.

The Newport Harbor Art Museum isn’t the only museum project in Orange County that’s been affected by slow-growth controversies.

In Costa Mesa last March, C.J. Segerstrom & Sons Inc. had to withdraw a 32-story office proposal after confronting heavy opposition at a City Council hearing from residents favoring more controlled development. Included in that plan was a satellite gallery to be run by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The Segerstrom firm has yet to submit a scaled-down new plan for the overall complex, to be built near the San Diego Freeway and Fairview Road. But officials at the Segerstrom firm and the Los Angeles County Art Museum said the 15,000-square-foot gallery operation would still be part of any revised plan.

Unlike the Segerstrom proposal, the Irvine Co.’s plan did win official approval. Last July, the Newport Beach City Council voted 5 to 2 to approve the Newport Center expansion, keyed to new commercial developments in and around the Fashion Island mall but also providing for major museum construction.

In August, under the approved City Council plan, the museum proposed building a new complex, 75,000 square feet in size, to replace the existing 23,000-square-foot structure built in 1977 on a two-acre site donated by the Irvine Co. New galleries and other facilities would be constructed on an undeveloped five-acre site south of the present museum. A museum annex, to include a 400-seat auditorium, would later be built on the site now occupied by a city library facility. (The library, in turn, would move its operations into the museum’s present structure.)

But in September, all planning and negotiations with the city came to a halt when it was announced that the Gridlock slow-growth coalition, seeking to overturn the July action by the City Council, had collected enough signatures to force the Nov. 25 vote.

Community backers and foes of the overall Newport Center plan both agree that major expansion of the museum itself is not disputed.

“Everyone wants the museum to stay in Newport Beach and to expand. Our concern is what could happen with all those office buildings going up,” said Allan Beek, spokesman for Gridlock.

“We see the museum as a matter independent of the rest of the (Newport Center) developments. As it stands now, the cultural element in the plan is just a lot of window dressing for them (Irvine Co.) to get their whole package passed. There’s no reason why the museum can’t go it alone and submit its own plan to the city.”

Newport Harbor Art Museum officials, however, maintain that if the Newport Center plan is rejected, the alternatives aren’t that favorable.

Under the existing city plan for the Newport Center, Consey said, the museum is allowed only “minor expansion”--about 8,000 square feet. “That level of expansion wouldn’t begin to meet our needs,” he added.

Consey added that the museum’s hands are tied when it comes to submitting another proposal for major expansion. According to city aides, if the Newport Center plan is defeated Nov. 25, state law precludes the submittal of any “substantially similar” plan for one year.