ANAHEIM, Calif. — The Anaheim City Council could approve the master site plan and finalize the $320 million purchase and land sale agreement between the city and an affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels for the city-owned Angel Stadium and its surrounding 153-acre parking lot site as early as later this month, city officials said.
City officials and a representative of SRB Management, a business entity affiliated with Angels owner Arte Moreno and his family, hosted the first of three virtual town halls Tuesday to answer questions from the community about the deal and the proposed mega project that could transform Angel Stadium and its surrounding area in the city’s growing Platinum Triangle into a live, work and play destination.
“Our plan is to create a transit-oriented, multimodal development that would give an opportunity for people to come to the site and enjoy all of the amenities,” SRB General Counsel Alex Winsberg said during the one hour and 15-minute Zoom virtual conference.
The town hall comes nine months after the city approved the tentative sale of the baseball stadium, an entertainment venue and its surrounding parking lots to Moreno, after almost a decade of bickering between the two sides over the renovation of the aging city-owned stadium, the fourth-oldest in Major League Baseball.
As part of the deal struck late last year, the city will sell the stadium, its surrounding parking lots, and the adjacent City National Grove theater to Moreno’s company in exchange for Moreno keeping the team in Anaheim through at least 2050. His company, SRB, would develop the land around the stadium similar to mixed-use developments in San Francisco, San Diego, and Wrigley Field in Chicago.
In the master site plan given to the city in June, SRB proposed to build millions of square feet of towering office buildings, retail shops, restaurants, hotels, and more than 5,100 new apartments and condominiums around a newly renovated or a brand new 45,000-seat baseball stadium. Moreno plans to privately finance the development.
Winsberg said SRB has not yet decided whether it would renovate the existing stadium, which was built in 1966, or build a brand new one in an area next to the current stadium.
Under the proposed agreement, the city will sell the stadium and land for $320 million but provide SRB a $170 million community benefit credit if SRB reserves 15 percent or 777 of its residential units for moderate and low-income qualified residents. The city is also asking SRB to develop a seven-acre park on the master-planned site. The city would receive $150 million final cash payment from Moreno.
“This is a component of the project that we are really excited about,” Anaheim Deputy City Manager David Belmer said. “The affordable units are going to be incorporated within the development of this master planned community as it occurs over time… It’s going to be mixed-income housing and we think it’s going to be a positive attribute for the project.”
Belmer said the city came up with the $123 million in credit to SRB for the building of affordable housing units using simple and complex “mathematical computations.”
City officials said during the town hall that if the Angels development is fully built, the city could reap nearly $40 million in annual property, sales, and hotel tax revenue by 2050. The estimated projection would be five times the $8 million seen each year from all of the Platinum Triangle, city officials said.
Once an industrial area, the 820-acre Platinum Triangle is home to Angel Stadium, the Anaheim Ducks’ home, the Honda Center, and the city’s regional transportation hub called Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center or ARTIC. In recent years, real estate developers, seeing the area’s potential, have poured more than $1.5 billion in commercial real estate developments in the Platinum Triangle, which sits only a few miles away from the Anaheim Convention Center and the Disneyland Resort.
“One of the long-term gains for the city… is the economic benefit,” Belmer said of the Angels development. “In our opinion, it’s all upside. Right now, what’s being generated is mostly surface parking surrounding Angel Stadium. In some respect, we can only go up from here. Obviously, there’s a lot of economic upside associated in this master plan community given its current scope.”
Winsberg, the SRB attorney, said his company is talking with the owners of the Ducks, who are building their own $3 billion mixed-use office, residential, and entertainment development called OCV!BE on a 115-acre site around the Honda Center and across the street from Angel Stadium. The development includes a pair of hotels, residential units with an affordable housing component, office buildings, retail, restaurants, and a food hall.
Winsberg said they are hoping to build complementary developments.
Belmer, the city official, said the city plans to link the two projects that would allow people to walk back and forth.
Winsberg did not disclose a timeline for the Angels development. Given the current environment with coronavirus, it’s hard to predict what will happen in the immediate future, he said.
City officials also said during the Zoom town hall that adding “Anaheim” to the Angels name was a no go from the start of the negotiations and would not be part of this agreement.
Anaheim City Spokesman Mike Lyster said the city planning commission would hold a meeting discussing the land uses for the Angels site on Wednesday.
The city will also host two more town halls, one on Saturday, Sept. 12 and another next Thursday, Sept. 24, leading up to the city council vote either at the end of this month or early October, Lyster said.