Building the Orange County Great Park: The Budget

This is the second post in a series on the building the Orange County Great Park. For part one, see yesterday’s post, “Building the Orange County Great Park: Is This Thing Buildable?“.

The Plan
The build out of the Orange County Great Park is estimated at about $1.1 billion. Since the goal of this project is to provide a visionary metropolitan park, instead of the common housing-mall-parks developments (which can be useful, but are also a dime a dozen in the O.C.), the Great Park development will be a long-term process (perhaps 50 years or so). However, some features are already available for public use; others will be available in the next one to two years.

For example, the free balloon rides and the beginning stage of the surrounding preview park are available now. The 27.5 acre preview park currently contains the balloon site, picnic areas, a walkable timeline of Orange County history on one of the old runway, a visitor center, and hangar 244—the El Toro aircraft hangar that has been refurbished into a cafe. A sports park is planned to be available in the next one to two years.

A more detailed and impressive summary of what the Great Park Design Studio and Great Park board have in mind for the long-term development of the Park is available by watching the June 16th board meeting. If you don’t have time to watch, I will probably write an update next month. Also, you can see the list of events that are being offered in the near term by viewing the Great Park calendar of events.

How will this be paid for?
The Great Park board approved a $60.3M budget for the fiscal year which started on July 1, 2008. This money will be used for projects such as further development of the preview park, demolishing runways and 43 military buildings, creating the wildlife corridor, working on the design schematic, overseeing the park project, and creating a community facilities district.

Staff expects the Great Park revenues for this fiscal year to be about $8M. However, in spite of the difference between revenue and expenditures, funds are and will be available for continued development. In fact, the Park had about $104M on hand on June 30, 2008, and the Great Park staff estimates that the Great Park funds on hand by the next fiscal year (July 2009-July 2010) will be about $99M. Irvine’s city funds will not be used as part of the funding for the Great Park development. The City’s funds and the Great Park funds are in separate accounts.

So where will the revenues come from? I’ll write about that in tomorrow’s post.

Tomorrow’s post: “Building the Orange County Great Park: Bring in the Revenue“