Great Park's Shameless PR Contract Halfed: FINALLY!

Kudos to Frank who has been on a crusade against the blatant spending for the OC Great Park. Agree, even cutting this wasteful contract in half doesn't cut it. As an Irvine resident, I get mad at the expense of the slick and expensive newsletters that come in my mailbox promoting the glories of the future Great Park. Yes, we had a recession that impacted getting it built because much of the funding comes from Lennar constructing homes on the former MCAS property and recycling money back into our community....... but there has been an abundance of wasteful spending and cozy contracting going on all along. Not to mention the DANG UGLY master design that Ken Smith prepared and the board approved. ~ Linda

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By FRANK MICKADEIT COLUMNIST / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

 

If there's one upside to the Great Park board frittering away of the bulk of $200 million on plans that will never get off the drawing board and the specter of losing $1.4 billion in redevelopment funds, it is this: It has been forced to ratchet back its shameless $1.2 million-a-year PR contract with Forde & Mollrich.

As of July 1, it will be only half as shameless, $600,000 a year, plus up to $300,000 a year in reimbursable expenses. That's still quite shameless, though, especially when the Great Park already has an in-house PR staff plus the city of Irvine's PR people at its disposal.

I've been harping on the sweetheart F&M deal for years as the most obvious and wasteful example of Larry Agran's doling out of park funds.

Councilman Jeff Lalloway has also picked up on this, and during this week's council meeting he closely questioned park CEO Mike Ellzey about the F&M contract. The wiggle room in the new deal is the $300,000 a year for expenses, a figure based on printing and mailing costs F&M has racked up in the past. But if F&M is only going to be doing half the work next year, why budget the same amount of expenses?

"That's an awful lot," Lalloway told Ellzey, and then asked when F&M last sent out a park newsletter. Ellzey wasn't sure but it wasn't this year. Lalloway also got clarification that the total revenue earned by the park is $8 million a year.

"It disturbs me that the Great Park spends over 10 percent of our revenue on public relations for this early phase of a construction project," Lalloway told me later.

As to the plans by architect Ken Smith getting off the drawing board, some certainly are, but it's clear that certain grandiose ideas are never going to happen. The biggest that's fallen by the wayside is the fake canyon he and Agran wanted to dig. It has been backfilled into a not-so-grand canyon, and could go away entirely.

Finally, we had Agran asserting that the $1.4 billion in redevelopment funds the state is taking is not yet lost, and that media reports about a court decision that went against the city has created confusion on this point.

True, as a city attorney pointed out, the court only refused to issue an order immediately blocking the state from taking the money. The court didn't rule on the merits of the city's argument, which is that it has obligated itself to spend that money to build the Great Park. In theory, if the court ultimately rules for the city, the $1.4 billion is there to build the park.

But the contract language committing the $1.4 billion specifically to build the park is ambiguous at best. The state attorney general says it doesn't even exist. No commitment in writing, no $1.4 billion. F&M will have to live with only $600,000 a year.