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Curt Pringle

Big-city mayor leads an Anaheim moving at full gallop.
By Craig Reem

He is a big-city mayor in a county that is still run very much like a small town. He has helped ease the Disneyland shadow ­ once the dominant thing here, looming like an oversized Mickey Mouse glove ­ and made the entire whole bigger than a walk down a mythical main street.

In fact, he is re-creating Main Street while helping reshape perhaps the most important city in Orange County.

Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle, who once filled for a short time the seat of longtime power broker Willie Brown as state Assembly speaker, has followed the arc of his more famous fellow legislator from the statehouse to City Council chambers. Brown, a Democrat, went from decades of Assembly fame to San Francisco, a city with international draw. Pringle, a Republican, left the Assembly at term-limit speed to become one of those real rarities in California where demeanor meets great timing ­ a mayor with tremendous pull in a city on the move.

His recent State of the City address before more than 800 attendees bore a list of real, recent city accomplishments, though it came a mere nine days before a jury decision proved that even a mayor who has hit his share of home runs for 3 1/2 years is going to strike out sometime. On Feb. 9, a jury decided against the city’s lawsuit battling the beloved Angels over naming rights. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, a moniker chosen by Angels owner Arte Moreno, will remain in an attempt to reach a larger market. Ironically, the decision comes at a time when Anaheim’s cache has never been higher.

Pringle, who has had his share of political defeats and remained essentially an upbeat, positive leader, was asked prior to the jury’s decision what the city would do if it lost its case:

“We move on,” he said.

There is much to move on to. As he said in a recent interview: “(Anaheim is) a microcosm of what we see in the state, if not the country, where you have great ethnic diversity, economic diversity, a lot of entrepreneurial activity. And you have an opportunity to build to the future.”

Anaheim and Santa Ana share the title as the county’s largest cities; Anaheim, with a population of 343,000, is about the size of St. Louis. And while St. Louis is a reflection of how big cities can slow to a crawl, Pringle seems to have learned why fastballs are a pitcher’s best friend. Throwing out the rule book from the state Legislature ­ where movement is glacial and everything highly partisan ­ he’s created a kind of controlled race course where change must be swift.

The list of approved, just opened, pending or hopeful city initiatives include an urban project with multiple high-rises, the Tiger Woods Learning Center, live-work complexes, citywide Wi-Fi, a possible NFL team, a possible NBA team and work on turning the fenced-off Santa Ana River into a user-friendly amenity. Tiger Woods’ project is a good example of the fast pace of big deeds these days: The Learning Center, a nonprofit 35,000-square-foot facility created for after-school instruction and career path direction, opened Feb. 10 with President Clinton in attendance.

“I would vote for Curt Pringle for president,” says one Orange County observer, a Democrat who has worked in corporate and private business for decades. “He has a lot of guts, meaning, if he wants to get it done, he’ll do what he has to do to get it done. He’s one of those politicians willing to hang it out there, and that’s a rarity.”

Pringle has on occasion been criticized for being just a bit too quick with a slap on the back and a fare-thee-well. But even detractors have been won over by the youthful-looking 46-year-old, who has changed uniforms as dramatically as Clark Kent from what might be defined as a rabid Republican partisan in the state Assembly to one of the most influential, and well-liked, mayors in the country.

“I went through a long period of not really knowing Curt but expressing relentless and public disdain for him,” says Mark Petracca, who heads UC Irvine’s political science department and is a longtime Democratic observer of county and state politics. “But I’ve gotten to know him.”

Petracca hired Pringle to teach state political courses at UCI, and he interacts on camera with the mayor, who is a fill-in guest on KOCE’s “Real Orange.”

“He’s bright; he’s not an ideologue. If you can compare him in his post-Assembly public persona with his Assembly public persona, these are two different people. The real variable difference is he got taken out of the partisan context that forces people sometimes to do crazy things.”

Working the whole floor

“Probably the best way to describe me anymore is I’m a relational guy,” Pringle says. “A lot of what I do is based upon relationships and friendships and working with other people. Over the last decade or two of my political and public life, I have developed a broad group of friends and I rely upon all of them, and I don’t necessarily say that I rely on only those of one political persuasion or another, or one geographic persuasion or another; all of that contributes greatly to the ability to govern a community like this.”

What he embraces today, in a city of nearly 350,000 residents, is development ­ the kind of high-rise, mixed-use bonanza that will put Anaheim’s urban renaissance on the map in the way Walt’s Disneyland put an exclamation mark on amusement parks. An enormous undertaking called the Platinum Triangle ­ an 820-acre urban- infill project that really could live up to the hope of becoming Orange County’s true downtown ­ may very well become a national model.

A couple of years ago, at an Urban Land Institute meeting, Pringle in effect told a group of developers, “Bring your projects to me.”

“He threw out the welcome mat for urban-infill development before anyone else did,” says someone who was in attendance.

“I don’t know of any developer who doesn’t want to be there,” says Richard Knowland, regional vice president for Lennar, which is building a key component in the Platinum Triangle known as A-Town.

“Who can you go to to get something done relatively quickly and with some fairly clear rules to proceed? Anaheim is
really stellar, both from a staff standpoint . . . and with the freedom to implement that vision.”

Unlike a large plot of land, where a homebuilder can slow down the phases it introduces with its tract homes should something go awry, you can’t stop a high-rise building at the 12th floor while a city reconsiders or stumbles.

“For us to do something in the urban format, we spend a lot of time evaluating the city’s capabilities in moving it forward,” says Knowland, whose company has more than $1.5 billion invested in projects in Orange County, including its long-term commitment as master developer at the former El Toro base.

There also is a value to a city that proves it knows what it is doing, Knowland suggests. “What Anaheim has done, at least with the Platinum Triangle, is create a land-value premium that wouldn’t otherwise be there.”

An economic driver

Anaheim’s strategic spot and ­ despite the Angels’ insistence on renaming the team the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim ­ its well-known name creates win-win scenarios.

“There are a few cities that are (economic) drivers,” says Esmael Adibi, a Chapman University economist. “Anaheim, Irvine, Santa Ana are the three leading cities in the county.” While he does not have data that breaks down each of the county’s city economies, Anaheim, with a little more than 10% of the total population, produces at least 10% of the county’s gross product. That would be about $17 billion a year in economic activity, fueled by its business base, more than 20 million tourists each year that includes convention trade, the Angels and the Arrowhead Pond, with its multiple uses such as the Mighty Ducks. But more is happening than Tom Sawyer’s Island, a convention’s all-you-can-eat breakfasts, a Vladimir Guerrero home run and hockey attendance. Says Adibi: “One thing Curt has done in his approach to the city is enhance business opportunity.”

While Pringle was in the Assembly a decade ago, the city was unsure of its future. The Walt Disney Co. found community opposition to a plan for a second mammoth amusement park that would have impacted area neighborhoods; instead the company settled on what became the smaller Disney’s California Adventure. Growth mattered. “In the decade of the ’90s, the population of Anaheim grew by 67,000 people, and developers built 6,000 housing units,” Pringle says. “A lot of people during that period of time said, ‘Let’s not build anything; we do not want to grow any larger; we don’t want to have the impacts of a larger city.’ What they missed, unlike a baseball movie analogy, ‘Build it, they will come,’ (is that) in this case, people came, whether you built it or not.

“We have a focus at this moment in time to address what wasn’t addressed in the 1990s.”

“California is leading the way in many ways,” says Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill, who introduced Pringle at his recent State of the City address, “whether there is a change in demographics, or a need for housing, or better transportation. I think he is very futuristic in his thinking.”

Touching the community

Pringle, in his way of doing business, reaches beyond boardrooms. Seferino Garcia was pleasantly surprised not only by the mayor’s openness, but that he thought enough to appoint Garcia to a city committee ­ the Community Development Housing Commission, which oversees some $7 million in federal HUD money for improving community centers, housing emergency assistance and the like.

“He’s the only mayor ­ and I’ve been here since 1977 ­ who cares for the community,” says Garcia.

It is a pragmatic as well as a human touch. About one-third of the city’s residents are Latino and the city’s favorite son is probably the Spanish-speaking Dominican, Angels star Vladimir Guerrero, an Anaheim Hills resident during the season.

“Curt actually listens to our strategic plan of action, our needs assessment,” says Garcia, the executive director of Solevar Community Development Corp., an Anaheim-based nonprofit social service agency that covers a lot of ground, from outreach to gang members to promoting Chicano studies curriculum in local high schools.

“Curt is really a people’s mayor. I didn’t think that when he first came on, him being a Republican. He has an open-door policy with the community, to let him know what the problems are.”

A city as a driver

Being a Republican engenders support from that side of the aisle, no doubt. But the impression is succinctly nonpartisan in describing what the man as mayor has accomplished in less than four years in office. Says Long Beach Mayor O’Neill: “The metro areas of the United States is where you have over 85% of the jobs, 85% of the income, 85% of the population ­ over 85% of the gross national product. The urban areas, the metro areas, are where people are living and where people are gravitating to.

“You have to have someone who understands what’s happening.”

She believes Pringle gets the message she heard once from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley when asked about the importance of downtowns: “It’s like an apple; if you have a bad core, or you don’t have a core, you have a rotten apple.”

Asked if he would mind becoming known as an urbanist mayor, Pringle smiles.

“I would find that title and classification just fine. An urbanist mayor in a community that embraces the suburbs. In this community, we really do have it all: We have the traditional 1950s neighborhoods, homes in the hills, and hopefully one day we’ll have a sprawling urban center, maybe two. That’s what I like . . . ‘one size fits all’ doesn’t necessarily need to apply here. A lot of people look at it and say, ‘Geez, the whole city’s turning urban.’ No, it’s not. After the Platinum Triangle is built, 80%
of our housing stock will be in a more traditional single-family or rental-type unit.”

Attorney Michael Capaldi, a regular Viewpoint contributor for OC METRO Magazine, is a Pringle friend who may soon have business in front of the city with his development company. Capaldi, on the board of the county’s influential Republican group, the Lincoln Club, has watched the mayor move from one stage to another.

“In Orange County circles, Curt has gone from the smartest young guy in conservative politics to one of the wiser veterans in Orange County politics,” Capaldi observes. “He really is, in terms of intelligence and sensitivity, a cut above of a lot of what we see here.

“For (Anaheim) to take a guy with that kind of talent and temperament, it’s a great thing for the city. He can deal with state government, local political powers. Nobody’s been where he’s been.”

If there is a secret, Capaldi believes, it is this: “He recognizes that the guy on the other side of the table might have a point, and more importantly, they may do business together. I don’t know if it’s instinctive or learned over the years, but he’s not afflicted by divisiveness.”

That would include Assemblyman Tom Umberg, a Democrat serving the 69th District and running for state Senate. In 1990, Pringle, a first-term assemblyman, and Umberg, an assistant U.S. attorney, ran what Umberg terms “a pretty acrimonious, expensive race.”

“President Reagan came to town (for Pringle), and my grandmother came to town,” Umberg recalls, recounting the odds of him winning against a Republican incumbent. And he did.

“Since then, we served a term together in the state Legislature,” Umberg says. “We’re now working together on several projects in the city of Anaheim. Perhaps it’s an example how common interests can bring people together.”

The 1990 loss made Pringle pause.

“If anybody is halfway intelligent, they use all of their successes and defeats as growing experiences, and I certainly did,” he says. “Probably the most important thing I learned out of that is, my life is not defined by the office I hold. It’s defined by my family, my faith and my philosophy and values. A lot of people, once they get to political office, they think that is their definition of who they are. To me, I saw how fleeting all of that was.”

Becoming mayor

As Pringle recounts, even 3 1/2 years ago he wasn’t exactly envisioning going from his Anaheim-based public relations/public affairs firm, Curt Pringle & Associates, where he continues to work, into the mayor’s office.

“I don’t necessarily want to say I was a reluctant candidate, but the long-serving mayor (Tom Daly) was termed out, and I had a lot of encouragement to consider doing this.”

Says Capaldi: “It’s important for a mayor to know what makes a city grow. Without growth, no jobs; without jobs, no opportunities; and without opportunities, there is poverty. You have to have somebody at the helm who understands that. Anaheim is a city that needs to redevelop, and what you’re getting here is a conservative approach to re-energizing California’s urban core. You have a test case in Anaheim, where you can look back 10 years from now, to see which model works better for urban redevelopment. One is the liberal, heavy government involvement, and the other is, let’s get out of the way of the private sector and see what they can do.”

“We trust the markets,” says Pringle, “and we believe the government can encourage them.”

One thing that Solevar’s Seferino Garcia does not want to contemplate: Going back to the old way of doing things. That gives him the impetus to prepare for a Curt Pringle vote this year, when the mayor seeks re-election in November.

“Most of the people in the grass-roots area, the poor sectors of Anaheim, are going to vote for him,” says Garcia. “Why? Because he’s our mayor and he does wonders for us.”

Should Pringle win another four-year term, Garcia will get someone who works the show. As Pringle gets up from a breakfast interview, he remarks, “This is life.” On this particular Tuesday, he has his State of the City speech, a business meeting in his office, a City Council meeting and a budget meeting. The following day, he will be on the stand in the naming-rights lawsuit against the Angels.

“I don’t anticipate running for any political office” after the next term, Pringle muses. “This is not geared as a stepping stone to run for something else. I’m very content to serve (for) another five years the community of Anaheim and continue to move among it in my private sector business. That might be just fine. Actually, that might just be perfect.” OCM