Irvine promises more transparency about its plan for gondolas at the Great Park

Irvine’s ambitious project to use gondolas to criss cross Great Park has faced criticism after LAist revealed that contracts worth $700,000 were signed outside of public view.

Now, officials are pulling the curtain back and embarking on what might be described as a transparency tour.

“We could have done things better, I think, in terms of providing information,” outgoing City Manager Oliver Chi told LAist. “I think what we're really trying to do is rectify that and provide as much info and all the info that we have on the overall analysis we've done moving forward.” (Chi is set to become the new city manager for Santa Monica.)

At this week’s Great Park board meeting, officials said they have set up a website with more information about the public transit system. And they will make presentations at a slew of upcoming gatherings to discuss the project and have the public weigh in:

Happening at Irvine City Hall, 1 Civic Center Plaza

• 5:30 p.m., June 2: Making a presentation at the city’s Finance Commission meeting 
• 5:30 p.m., June 3: At the city’s Transportation Commission meeting

Happening at Hangar 244, 260 Corsair

• 9:40 a.m., June 5: At the city’s Mobility Summit 
• 6 p.m., June 9: At a Public Town Hall meeting 

How we got here

A rendering of a Swyft Cities gondola. Swyft Cities is currently working with the city of Irvine on the Great Park project.

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Courtesy Swyft Cities

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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.

So what's the problem? LAist learned that the project has already cost taxpayers around $700,000, doled out via contracts that were signed out of public view.

“If there's any mistake, it's ultimately my responsibility. We didn't do enough,” Chi said.  ”We didn’t do enough outreach as has been made clear to us the last couple of weeks, and I think we're trying to rectify that at this point moving ahead.”

But does that mean everyone is on board now?

Not quite.

After staff finished presenting a comprehensive overview of the project Tuesday afternoon, Councilmember James Mai, who sits on the Great Park Board, raised questions about the quality of the work done so far.

“I don't see what much we have for $715,000. We got a demo unit and some marketing slides for $715, I would've spent it on something else,” he said.

The design mockups were particularly bad, he said: “These slides are basically AI. It's like somebody put a prompt on ChatGPT and generated some images here, it's not realistic, it's not real.”

Residents also lined up to blast the gondola project as being unrealistic, and shortsighted for serving just the park — and not the entire city.

After the meeting, LAist spoke with some of those residents.

Quan Narula, an Irvine resident said there are “many red flags” about the project “in terms of engineering feasibility, in terms of cost, in terms of the process of how rushed it was and the money that's already been spent on it.”

“I've never been involved in local politics before, but this is the one thing that just felt so wrong on so many levels,” he said. “It was important enough for me to speak out and come here.”

Leeza Bondarchuk, a CalPoly Pomona student in urban and regional planning and an Irvine resident,  said a gondola project is too limited.

”If they want to commercialize transportation, if they want to market transportation, they should have a bus system because after all, Irvine is a transit desert," she said.

She added that a gondola system just within the Great Park would isolate the neighborhood from other parts of the city.

Youssef Kaddeche, who sits on the city’s Transportation Commission and an activist with the transportation advocacy group RISE — Remake Irvine Streets for Everyone — said, “There are real, proven, scalable solutions that the city could be implementing that are not flashy, that are not sexy, but they're real and there are cost efficient.”

“ Instead we're pursuing the system that's completely unverified, completely questionable capacity claims,” he added.

(A city news release had stated that the gondolas can carry up to 10,000 passengers per hour, but on Tuesday, officials called that a “theoretical number.”)

Instead, Kaddeche said, the city should be expanding services like Irvine CONNECT, a free daily shuttle service.

 ”We can connect people not just within the Great Park, but outside of the Great Park into the Great Park,” he said. “So that we can reduce the need for parking, so that we can reduce traffic congestion.”

What’s next

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.

How to keep tabs on Irvine

• Irvine holds City Council meetings on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month at 4 p.m. in the City Council Chamber, Irvine City Hall, 1 Civic Center Plaza. For a calendar of 2025 meetings, click here.
  
• Great Park Board meetings are held in the same place and follow the same schedule, but take place at 2 p.m.
  
• You can also watch City Council meetings remotely on ICTV via Channel 30 live or via replay. (You can also find videos of previous council meetings there). Here are instructions to watch via Zoom.
  
• The public comment period happens toward the beginning of meetings. You can fill out a "request to speak" form here.
  
• The city generally posts agendas for City Council meetings on the previous Friday. You can find the agenda on the city’s website or sign up there to have agendas sent to your inbox.

Go deeper

A gondola project in Irvine has already cost taxpayers $700K. Here's why that matters
How to watchdog your local government