What happens to a major lawsuit and pending appeal when a $500 million retail development that was the target of the suit filed nearly four years ago against the city of Arcadia and developer Caruso Affiliated by mall owner Westfield doesn’t exist anymore?
Arcadia City Manager Don Penman will explain to all attendees of the free monthly Arcadia Chamber of Commerce Government Affairs Forum open to the public at 8 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 2 at the Chamber conference room, 388 W. Huntington Dr. (round building in the media at Holly Avenue). He will also answer questions from attendees at the forum which, as always, is free and open to the public. The monthly one-hour forums, held on the first Thursday of each month also include reports from other representatives of the City of Arcadia, Los Angeles County, our state Senator and Assemblymen, and federal Representative, as well as frequent updates from representatives of the Gold Line Foothill Extension Authority.
The City Council unanimously approved the 830,000 square-foot Shops at Santa Anita in April 2007, but later had to rescind that approval when a court ruled that 11 points in the massive Environmental Impact Report needed to be reviewed and improved. Suddenly, there was no more City-approved project.
While that was happening, Westfield and partner Arcadia First! appealed the court’s ruling in favor of the City and Caruso on 18 other points. In March of 2009, that appeals process was put on hold when the owner of Santa Anita Park filed for bankruptcy protection. Suddenly, everything was up in the air.
A year later, the unit of track owner Magna Entertainment Corp. that struck the joint venture deal with Caruso in 2005, pulled out of that joint venture in April of this year. The track emerged from bankruptcy under a new Magna entity called Magna International (MI) Developments. Suddenly, there was no project at all on which the lawsuit and pending appeal were based.
Everyone was back to square one, as if all the work of the last six years never happened. Rick Caruso and Magna/Santa Anita Park owner Frank Stronach are negotiating a potential new deal that could be completed and announced as early as this month. Even a slightly scaled-down new project rumored to be in the works would take an estimated two years to open from the time it would finally be allowed to begin construction. The original development was projected to bring more than $2 million in sales tax revenue to the city each year, and potentially much more in ancillary benefits.
But what about the pending courtroom litigation that has already cost Westfield and Caruso millions of dollars? Penman will answer that question Thursday morning.
Penman was not the City manager when the Shops at Santa Anita project was begun. And there have been two City Council elections and two new City Councils and four different Mayors since the original approval. But four of the same five Councilmen who approved the Shops at Santa Anita in 2007 — Mayor Amundson and Councilmen Mickey Segal, Bob Harbicht, and Roger Chandler — are on the current Council. Only Mayor Pro Tem Gary Kovacic was not among that body in 2007.
If there is a topic you want to discuss or know of a guest speaker, please email Peter Ulrich at ulrichcmb@verizon.net, Scott Hettrick at Hreporter@aol.com or Mary Dougherty at mary@bdog.net.
— By Scott Hettrick