Santa Ana’s Orange County Hall of Administration deserved better.
The County of Orange’s long-time headquarters, which cost $8.1 million to build and was inaugurated in 1978, is now being demolished. The County of Orange is the administrative body in charge of the unincorporated parts of Orange County. It was the most recent building to fall at the Orange County Civic Center. Numerous county agencies, including the Health Care Agency, Orange County Superior Court, Sheriff-Coroner, District Attorney, and County Procurement, whatever it is, are located in the region.
Each of those has a building of its own. The five members of the Board of Supervisors, however, were the centre of attention at the Hall of Administration.
Just in the early years following the Hall of Administration’s construction:
- Robert Battin, a former supervisor, was released from prison after serving time for abusing county employees during a failed bid for lieutenant governor.
- Ralph Diedrich, another senator, was accused of conspiring to commit bribes.
- A third person (Philip L. Anthony) pleaded not guilty to receiving money that had been improperly obtained for his political campaign.
Due to their mischief, the Board of Supervisors wouldn’t have a majority of Democrats until this year.
The corruption was just the beginning of years of turmoil. There was the bankruptcy of 1994, which was the biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history at the time. The board’s authority was also diminished as more unorganized regions turned into cities. The O.C. supervisors are now more akin to five Little Lord Fauntleroys than the “five little kings” that the L.A. County Board of Supervisors were in the past. A brief public space on the east side of the Hall of Administration was the site of an Occupy O.C. campout in the early 2010s, followed by a homeless encampment that lasted for years before being finally closed off.
More recently, the public meeting rooms were used as a stage for O.C. Pendejo politics, whether there were large demonstrations against Irvine’s temporary housing or against mask and vaccine requirements. The Hall of Administration kept leaking and getting older and more run-down.
It had little possibility of success. The design of the Hall of Administration (created by a significant Diedrich campaign supporter) was shoddy brutalism. The L.A. Times described the Hall of Administration as a “huge stack of white boxes” and a “teetering pile of crates” in an article written days before it opened; a reader referred to it as “Hadrian’s palace.”
In the middle of the 2000s, Norberto Santana Jr., then a county government reporter for the Orange County Register and now a columnist and publisher for the Voice of OC, was a frequent visitor to the Hall of Administration. The press room in the basement was so small and crammed with reporters that a joke went around that the supervisors had designed it that way “so that if there was a fire, every reporter would be burned to a crisp.”
Santana recalled his previous employment at the San Diego Union-Tribune: “I was used to going in and out of supervisors’ offices. I was shocked to learn that Orange County has structures built to keep people out.
There was no formal farewell to the ancient hoss at the Board of Supervisors’ final meeting held in the Hall of Administration in August. The top executives then relocated to a new $400 million structure that Santana referred to as “something from the Soviet era” (I personally think it looks more like the sandcrawler that Jawas used on Tatooine). Its name, which sounds like it belongs in “1984” North County Administration.
Midway through December, work on demolishing the Hall of Administration began. What will take its place? The county will pave this non-paradise so that a parking lot can be built, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell.
