Apartment Complex Granted New Hearing

IRVINE — A proposal to build an apartment complex in an area surrounded by manufacturing and industrial buildings will be heard by the City Council tonight, five months after planning commissioners called the site one of the worst in the city.

The Planning Commission denied the proposed 87-unit McGaw Apartments complex last August by a 4-1 vote. The commission said the site on McGaw Avenue west of Jamboree Road was too close to companies that use toxic chemicals and generate too much noise.

Commission Chairman Richard Salter said at the time that the location was one of the worst places in the city to build apartments. After the Planning Commission rejected the proposal, the developer, the Schroeder Co. in Corona del Mar, appealed to the City Council.

The council on Oct. 27 asked the Planning Commission to look at the project again because the environmental safeguards were slightly reworded in the proposal and state law requires reworded documents to go back through the public review process. Professional city planners who have reviewed the proposal say that, with proper environmental precautions, the apartment complex would be safe for residents.

Those precautions include a system of rooftop sensors that would sniff the air and sound an alarm if dangerous levels of chemicals are detected. If the alarm sounds, residents would be told to close windows and doors and the building’s air-conditioning and heating system would be automatically sealed to prevent the hazardous chemicals from seeping indoors.

The apartment owner also would be required to keep a 24-hour manager at the apartment in case of a chemical accident, and would have to try to work out a plan with neighboring industries to call building management in the event of a a chemical accident.

If adopted, the high-technology system to protect the apartment residents would be the first of its kind in Irvine, said Sheri Vander Dussen, Irvine’s manager of Development Services.

Salter said Wednesday that he is disappointed that the apartment project is coming back to the commission.

“If we approve this, there would be a lot of other developers saying it’s appropriate to put their high-rise apartments next to hazardous material sites and noisy carpet mills and areas that don’t have sidewalks and schools,” Salter said.

William Rice, a representative of the Schroeder Co., could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

However, city planners have determined that the recommended precautions, including the rooftop sensors, would adequately protect the McGaw Apartments residents. Planners would not endorse the apartment project if it were thought to be unsafe, Community Development Director Robert J. Johnson said.

He added that residential units already exist near the industrial buildings, including the 403-unit Charter Apartments at Jamboree Road and Kelvin Avenue, approved by the city in 1987. When that project was approved, the city did not have the advantage of recently passed state laws that require industries to publicly declare the type and quantity of chemicals they use, Johnson said.

Because the city is now aware of what chemicals are used in the Irvine Business Complex, he said, “we wanted to make sure there were appropriate monitoring devices.