Irvine Golf Course Housing Project Could Go Before Voters

Irvine Company’s planned project to turn a golf course site in Irvine into housing could come before voters at some point in the future.

Irvine City Council members are currently considering putting the redevelopment of Oak Creek Golf Club on the ballot after a June 24 meeting where some members expressed interest in placing the issue on an upcoming ballot, Voice of OC reported. The council concluded by voting unanimously to advance a general plan amendment analysis for the proposed Oak Park Village project.

Irvine Company filed plans for the development in May. If approved, it would replace Oak Creek Golf Club with 3,100 housing units — 1,500 of them single-family homes and the remaining 1,600 being apartments — spread across 193 acres. It would also create a new school, parks and other community spaces.

At the June city council meeting, critical voters and former city officials argued that the plan would violate a 1988 voter-approved measure that preserves the golf course as a permanent open space. Critics believe that because voters nearly four decades ago chose to preserve the golf course as open space, it should either stay that way in perpetuity or appear on a future ballot to remove the preservation designation.

Jeff Melching, city attorney for Irvine, said at the May 13 city council meeting that the specific wording of the resolution gives the council sole authority to make changes without input from voters.

“The people did not directly legislate an amendment to the city’s general plan. The people advised the city council that it should make amendments to the general plan,” Melching said. “And because the measure was structured that way, that gives the city council the discretion now to re-amend the general plan to remove that preservation designation without going back out to the voters.”

Mayor Larry Agran, who was also mayor in 1988 when the resolution was originally passed, disagreed with Melching’s assessment.

“The only way that [open-space designation] can be changed is if the people of the city of Irvine approved a subsequent ballot measure,” Agran said at the June meeting. “My belief is that that’s the way we have to play it. We have to play it straight. My view is that we need to be faithful to what we said at the time.”

Other members of the council assented. “I think we should go to the voters out of the sake of transparency,” City Council member James Mai said. “I want to hear from the voters, and I want to hear from the voters en masse — that’s how this thing works right?”

City staff will now spend the next year conducting assessments on the project, including an environmental and traffic review, before the matter returns to various commissions and eventually reappears before the city council sometime next year.

— Chris Malone Méndez