Lake Elsinore buying time to plan civic center

By AARON BURGIN

Lake Elsinore’s plans for a $75 million civic center campus came to an abrupt halt recently.

Lake Elsinore officials plan to take 18 months to analyze not only the proposed civic center, but the revitalization of Main Street.

Poised to vote on the location of the new civic center, Lake Elsinore City Council in October and shelved a competition that yielded three finalists for the proposed civic center’s design.

Now, most city officials are content with taking 18 months to analyze not only the proposed civic center, but the revitalization of Main Street.

A proposed $250,000 downtown master plan would allow officials to establish a new set of development and planning guidelines for the mile-long stretch of road from Interstate 15 south to the lake and the surrounding area.

City staff is now developing a request for proposals to find a consultant to head the master-plan process.

“With an overview of the entire area, it gives us a better chance for success,” Mayor Robert Magee said about the master plan.

Councilman Thomas Buckley voted against the plan, calling it “a step backward” that puts development in downtown in a holding pattern for 1 ½ years.

“I think the civic center was a chance to show the rest of the world that Lake Elsinore had turned a corner,” Buckley said. “We veered off the road.”

A New Main Street

Buckley started discussions for the civic center campus in 2004. City officials, however, said the civic center was the centerpiece of the council’s downtown-revitalization visions.

“The council has set a clear vision of improving downtown from the freeway to the lake,” city spokesman Mark Dennis said. “The civic center played prominent in those plans.”

Those plans include:

Mixed-use housing/commercial developments on Main Street, which city officials hope would bring permanent residents downtown and help foster nightlife in the area.

Government offices, potentially including satellite offices for state and county officials.

A new library, post office (the city’s business incubator) and other services.

The city also needs a new City Hall because the current one’s office and conference space is at capacity, Dennis said.

“We are in very tight quarters,” Dennis said.

A master plan, Dennis said, would provide guidance for the location of these buildings, and would identify other uses that could thrive in the downtown location.

Prior to the Oct. 23 vote to pursue the master plan, the City Council appeared to be heading toward a vote on the civic center component of the project. It had spent more than a year discussing the plan in study sessions and had settled on a design competition to determine the architect for the $75 million campus.

By July, the city had narrowed the field of 24 finalists to three: Santa Monica-based Koning Eizenberg Architecture, San Diego-based Hanna Gabriel Wells Architects and Boston-based Brian Healy Architects.

The civic center study session on Aug. 23 ultimately changed the course of the project.

City officials were prepared to choose the location of the civic center campus from two sites—the first included 9.54 acres surrounding the Cultural Center on Main Street and Heald Avenue; the second was a 16.75-acre strip that stretched from Main and Limited streets south to the lake.

Of the 24 design entries, 22—including the finalists—chose the lakeside setting, including one design that had Main Street run to the lake.

The meeting, Buckley said, took a turn when a number of residents criticized the civic center designs, which utilized contemporary architecture. The opponents blasted the designs in favor of traditional Lake Elsinore architecture, a mix of Mission and Monterrey styles.

“It was a few loud people that derailed the entire project,” Buckley said.

The concept of the master plan was formulated in large part by the design competition architects, two of whom, Matt Wells and Brian Healy, said the city needed better direction before making its decision.

“They lacked consensus about where the civic center should finally be going,” Healy said.

The council voted Oct. 23 also to end the design competition and pay each finalist $10,000.

Too Long a Wait?

Buckley, who cast the lone dissenting vote, said 18 months is too long to stall development downtown, which is what the master plan would do.

The delay, he said, could lead to the city potentially losing time-sensitive grant funding, as well as the post office, which has a federal timeline for when a new Lake Elsinore branch would open.

“We’ve pretty much jeopardized these things,” Buckley said.

At the Oct. 23 meeting, he offered an alternate proposal that called for city staff to handle the downtown review, use two of the finalists from the design competition to redevelop a new civic center design consistent with the council’s design preferences, and attempt to acquire property from both proposed sites to develop the campus.

His proposal was not seconded.

Several downtown business owners said while they wish downtown development moved at a faster pace, they were happy to see the city take an interest in the area, after years of development steered toward the 15 freeway.

“It has to be more than the civic center,” said Dan Hamilton, who is developing a lakeside marina in Lake Elsinore. “Like Temecula, when they moved all of their main events to their Old Town area, it has to be more than just development.”

Magee agreed.

“We may not agree on the details, but this council is united on wanting to improve downtown,” Magee said.

Reach Aaron Burgin at 951-375-3733 or [email protected]