A gondola project in Irvine has already cost taxpayers $700K. Here's why that matters

When an ambitious gondola-transit system was unveiled in Irvine last month, it promised to have residents reaching for the skies and breezily bypassing traffic as it whisked them up and over the 1,300-acre Great Park below.

Even better, city officials said: the company would donate services and equipment worth up to $10 million in the first year.

But LAist has learned that the project has already cost taxpayers around $700,000, doled out via contracts that were signed out of public view — and outside the pathway voters established for Great Park procedures and expenditures.

The project is scheduled to come before the Great Park board on Tuesday, but at least one council member wants to hit the brakes.

Councilmember Kathleen Treseder told LAist she is “very concerned.”

“ It seems like the train has already left the station,” she said. “I'm trying to figure out how to stop it.”

How we got here

For years, Irvine has been looking for a public transit system to best navigate the Great Park, which city officials envision as a rival to NYC’s Central Park. But it’s also a 1,300-acre beast to navigate: any public transit system would have to provide visitors and residents with access to the recreational and entertainment facilities planned for the park without causing traffic headaches for neighbors.

The city hit roadblock after roadblock with proposals for how to best navigate through and around the park’s pedestrian walking paths and roadways via a tram or light rail system.

So city planners looked to the skies.

The company Irvine contracted to study the viability of such an ambitious project turned out to be the very company with interests in building a gondola public transit system, which some critics consider problematic.

The project came in front of the Great Park board — composed of Irvine’s mayor and council members — for the first time in April. At that meeting, City Manager Oliver Chi previously told LAist officials were asking the Great Park Board “whether or not we want to formally start assessing Swyft and engage contract negotiations for what a system could look like in the Great Park.”

But nothing was finalized at the time, and there was no indication that this was to be the public transit system of Great Park. Yet,after that meeting, everything about the project seemed to speed up.

What happened next

Just two weeks later, hundreds of Irvine residents descended on Great Park for the annual State of the Great Park address. There were drummers, a pop up ice hockey rink, bounce houses — and a full-size model gondola. There was also a VR experience that took visitors on a gondola ride through Great Park.

Visitors enjoy a VR experience of the proposed Irvine gondola public transit system.

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Courtesy City of Irvine

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The model gondola pods were branded with the city’s crest and Great Park’s distinct orange color. People queued up to sit and take photos inside.

For some, like Treseder, the big question was how could all of this have happened in just the two weeks since the Great Park board gave the go ahead to start taking fledgling steps towards a potential partnership.

She flat out refused to attend. She said she “didn't think it was appropriate for us to be spending the money on the fake gondola for that event.”

Chi, the city manager, has not returned phone calls seeking comment on this issue. (On Friday afternoon, Santa Monica city officials announced that Chi is the new pick for its city manager post.)

Jeral Poskey, the chief executive of Swyft Cities, said Friday, “ I don't know city policies or what the rules are around Great Park spending. Everything I've heard says it's all followed process.”

The company behind the gondola project

Swyft Cities is the company Irvine is negotiating with for the gondola public transit system. Gondolas are used in the United States at ski resorts and tourist attractions. But Irvine’s would be the first to use a gondola as a public transit system in the U.S., proponents say.

Gondolas are used for public transit in other places including Algeria, Colombia and Bolivia. But Swyft Cities has yet to build a gondola transit system anywhere.

The company is offering Irvine a one-year trial period worth around $10 million in equipment and services — for free — in exchange for being recognized as “the mass transit option for the Great Park.” That money will cover eight gondolas operating between two stations connecting the Great Park’s visitor center and balloon ride with a planned retail facility, as well as maintenance and operational costs.

Poskey said at the April meeting that the idea for the gondola public transit system was born at Google when the tech giant was exploring solutions to connect one end of its sprawling campus with another. Poskey was working at Google at the time.

The pandemic upended Google’s plans, but Poskey was so taken with the idea that after he left Google he started Swyft Cities and has been shopping the gondola idea around the world, from Queensland in New Zealand to Sugar Land, outside Houston.

The tech system behind the project, Whoosh, was pioneered by a New Zealand-based company.

Poskey told LAist in an interview that the company had done studies that addressed how the gondola public transit system could fit into the masterplan for Great Park and how it could meet the ridership demands.

Why Great Park is different

Great Park is a nonprofit corporation governed by unique rules.

Voters passed Measure V in 2014 mandating that expenditures or contracts cannot be authorized for Great Park without a recommendation from the Great Park Board of Directors and approval from the City Council.

At an April meeting of the Great Park board, Treseder asked about a gondola contract she had discovered that dated back to December 2024 for about $200,000 — the first time she said she had heard of it.

“ I was not told of it at all by anybody,” she said.

Chi said the contract was to test the viability of a gondola system.

So about those Great Park contracts

According to the December agreement Treseder discovered, the city is “actively planning a Whoosh system to enhance connectivity within Great Park.” The contract noted the need to reach out to entities like the Orange County Transportation Authority to discuss next steps.

But the project has not even come in front of Great Park’s finance and transportation commissions, an important early step in the process.

The money spent to date, however, suggests this project is well on its way.

LAist has also found four other contracts associated with the project totaling just over $550,000:

• May 21, 2024: A $172,000 contract with Swyft Cities for a feasibility study
• Feb. 3, 2025: A $50,000 contract with HDR (an engineering company) to forecast gondola ridership numbers
• March 26, 2025: A $249,550 contract with Aria Group to build a model gondola pod
• March 28, 2025: A $65,200 contract with Swyft Cities to build a VR experience of the gondola public transit system

Together with the contract from December, around $700,000 has been spent on the project so far.

Those last two contracts are noteworthy because it means Irvine taxpayers had no idea they had footed the bill for the VR experience and the very gondola they were posing with that day in Great Park.

Poskey told LAist Swyft Cities was not involved in the building of the gondola model for the Great Park event: all they did was provide the city with the design.

April’s meeting agenda had no mention of the contracts. After LAist started asking questions and filing public records requests, the contracts are now scheduled to be discussed at the next meeting.

What’s next

Irvine’s Great Park board will meet at 2 p.m. Tuesday. Staff plan to share with board members how they arrived at the gondola public transit system plan.

How to watchdog local government

One of the best things you can do to hold officials accountable is pay attention.

Your city council, board of supervisors, school board and more all hold public meetings that anybody can attend. These are times you can talk to your elected officials directly and hear about the policies they’re voting on that affect your community.

• Read tips on how to get involved.
• The next scheduled Great Park board meeting is 2 p.m. on Tuesday, May 27. You can find meeting agendas and upcoming dates here. 
• And submit an eComment on the agenda here.