The trenches have been dug, barbed wire strung up, and mines laid for the most acrimonious county construction dispute since the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. This local Sunni Triangle: the corner of 10th and Broadway in downtown Santa Ana, where mega-developer Mike Harrah wants to build One Broadway Plaza.
Harrah—who looks like an NFL center masquerading as ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill—already owns about 50 buildings in Orange County's largest city and cultivates connections with city officials like some housewives grow roses. But 2 million square feet of office space isn't enough for the Harley-riding, Newport Beach-living developer. With One Broadway Plaza, Harrah is aiming for another designation: the Man who Revived Santa Ana by Erecting a 37-story Building. The proposed behemoth would be nearly double the height of the county's current skyscraper champion (the comparatively dwarfish 21-story Plaza Tower in Costa Mesa) and cast a shadow over the city that in olden times would've been interpreted as sign of Armageddon.
Harrah maintains that One Broadway Plaza (OBP) would mark Orange County's growth from tract-home purgatory to urban trendsetter. Many Santa Ana residents don't agree. Preparing to ambush Harrah, they've zeroed in on the first possible target in the War on OBP: Santa Ana Councilwoman Claudia Alvarez.
Fresh from her embarrassing March 4 defeat in the 69th Assembly District Democratic primary, Alvarez had probably hoped to return to generally mundane municipal business. Instead, she faces accusations from OBP opponents who say she is circumventing city conflict-of-interest laws to help Harrah.
Santa Ana's seven-member council was set to decide on One Broadway Plaza's fate during its March 15 meeting. Then dozens of residents from neighborhoods near the project site arrived to announce their opposition. Facing angry voters, the council voted 4-1 (with two abstentions) to delay their decision on the development for 60 days; it'll now be the most-watched item on the May 17 council agenda.
One of the abstainers was Mayor Miguel Pulido; a former business partner is involved in Harrah's project. The other abstainer was Councilman Brett Franklin, who announced he wouldn't vote on One Broadway Plaza because Harrah contributed to Franklin's unsuccessful bid to become the First District county supervisor.
But Alvarez—who also accepted money from Harrah for her Assembly campaign—voted anyway. She says city attorney Joseph Fletcher told her voting on the skyscraper would not constitute a conflict of interest, and she says she'll continue to vote on the project.
Fletcher confirmed Alvarez's claim. “[Santa Ana has] a local campaign-reform charter in its municipal code, but that doesn't apply to anything other than city offices,” he told the Weekly. “There's a provision that prohibits council members from affecting projects that deal with major campaign contributors if they received more than $250 in the previous year. But our regulations don't apply to [donations for] state or regional offices.”
On its face, the Santa Ana city charter seems to contradict Fletcher's analysis. Section 425 bars council members from voting on matters in which “it is reasonably foreseeable that the decision will have a material financial effect . . . on a recent major campaign contributor.” “Recent major campaign contributor” is then defined as someone “who has made campaign contributions totaling $250 or more to the council member or to any campaign committee controlled by the council member in the 12-month period immediately preceding the date of the decision.” The passage makes no distinctions among political races.
Campaign-finance records reviewed by the Weekly reveal that Franklin received a $1,000 donation from Harrah's Caribou Industries on April 1, 2003. Alvarez received $3,200—the maximum donation allowable under California campaign-finance law—from Harrah's Eastcom Corp. on June 30 of last year. (Both Alvarez and Franklin failed to return calls for this story.)
“This is a significant project. Alvarez knew the project was coming out,” said Joann Ramírez, a member of Broadway Bulldogs, the civic watchdog group opposing OBP in its current location. “She shouldn't have taken money [from Harrah] at all. I don't care what Fletcher says: you can't have the slightest hint of any impropriety in something like this.”
Ramírez also cites another gift that won't appear on any campaign-finance statement: the blossoming of red-white-and-blue “Alvarez for Assembly” signs on many of Harrah's Santa Ana properties in the weeks preceding the primary. (Full disclosure: an Alvarez banner hung from the Weekly's world headquarters at 1666 N. Main St.; Harrah owns the building.) Attorney Jim Pantone noticed the signs a few days before Election Day: driving up Broadway, he noticed Alvarez signs stuck into the lawn of the Victory Outreach Christian Center near his office.
“I called the Victory Outreach people, and they told me they were aware of the signs but had not approved them,” says Pantone, a three-year resident of nearby Washington Square, a neighborhood in the metaphorical—and perhaps literal—shadow of the proposed OBP. “The impression that I got was that they had no say in the signs being there. But when I found out that Harrah owned it, it made sense.”
“Alvarez for Assembly” signs remained near Victory Outreach's entrance as this story went to press. “If Fletcher says that Alvarez voting [on One Broadway Plaza] is technically legal, I think that's a ridiculous construction for Alvarez to accept and at the very least a very slippery ethical boundary,” says Pantone. “She circumvents and frustrates the entire intent of what the law is for, which is prohibiting financial benefit for supporting a resolution. Her concept of integrity seems to be that as long as it's not breaking the law, it's okay. An apt analogy is adultery—I can sleep around with people, and it's okay because it's not illegal. To marginalize people's concerns like that is disturbing.”
