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Laguna Scouts May Be Forced to Break Camp

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Times Staff Writer

The Laguna Beach City Council, searching for ways to offset mounting costs from the Bluebird Canyon landslide, is considering the sale of city-owned land -- including property used by generations of Girl Scouts.

For more than 50 years, the organization has leased two High Street properties near the Festival of the Arts for $1 a year.

Thousands of girls from Orange and Los Angeles counties -- including about 20% of Laguna Beach’s students -- use the facility for overnight camping, cookouts, meetings and other activities, said Gail Ellis-Olds, spokeswoman for the Girl Scout Council of Orange County.

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“If it’s closed, every Girl Scout is going to lose,” Ellis-Olds said. “The people there are passionate about this location. There are women in Laguna Beach that have memories that go way back to all the times they spent at this house. They’ve had their first sleepovers there. They learned to cook there. They had camp-outs there.”

But for all the sentimentality attached to the land, Laguna Beach is confronting a more urgent task: coming up with $15 million to pay for landslide recovery such as stabilizing and rebuilding the hill. More than 20 homes were destroyed or seriously damaged in the June 1 slide and dozens more were threatened. Some families have not been allowed to return because their homes are on the edge of the unstable hillside.

“We basically have been subsidizing Girl Scouts for the past 50 years,” said City Manager Kenneth C. Frank. “There are other youth groups that don’t use facilities on city property. It’s been great, but we’re looking at a crisis situation.”

Those two lots are among eight parcels the city is considering putting up for sale, among them a maintenance yard that houses city park vehicles.

Local officials learned Thursday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency declined the city’s request for federal disaster assistance -- an estimated $1.5 million that would have paid for roads, sewers and other public infrastructure.

“Our cash situation is a little more desperate today than it was a couple days ago,” Frank said.

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The two parcels where the Girl Scout house is located would probably fetch about $1.5 million in today’s market, he said.

City officials aren’t taking lightly the sale of the properties, but they’re running out of options. Already, they have delayed the purchase of firetrucks and sewer-cleaning trucks and put other capital improvements on the back burner to scrape together money for Bluebird Canyon repairs.

“Nobody is going to be happy when it gets done,” Frank said of the budget cutting. “Everybody is going to lose something.”

Councilwoman Toni Iseman agreed: “I don’t see a choice but to sell the Girl Scout house. It’s been a nice opportunity for a number of years. I’m sure we can find some other facilities that they’ll be able to use.”

Although city officials have said they would try to work with the Girl Scouts, some on the Girl Scout Council said it would be difficult to find a similar property -- one equipped with an outdoor amphitheater, a cookout area, and a house with meeting space. Girl Scout officials said they cannot afford to buy the site.

Katie Slattery, a Laguna Beach troop leader and member of a three-generation Scouting family, said that besides serving hundreds of local girls, the site has introduced the beach community to out-of-town Scouts -- creating future tourists.

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“They should find a way of meeting their fiscal needs that doesn’t so deeply and negatively affect our youth,” Slattery said. “Hurting one segment of the community to help another is not the way to solve problems. Girl Scouting serves the community in many ways.”

Slattery and other volunteers plan to attend the City Council’s Sept. 6 meeting, when the sale is to be discussed.

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