Tour guests catch rare glimpse of Banning Ranch
About 20 members of the public got a rare tour Wednesday of the 401-acre Newport Beach coastal spread known as Banning Ranch, the possible future home of a controversial residential, hotel and retail development.
Five interns, all recent high school graduates from Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa who are now working with the Newport Banning Land Trust, outlined for guests various restoration efforts underway and in the works for the site, which currently is home to a host of oil drilling operations. The students also identified various invasive plants they said are choking out native species and pointed out natural elements like vernal pools.
Banning Ranch is the largest undeveloped coastal property in Southern California. But developer Newport Banning Ranch LLC proposes to build 895 homes, a 75-room hotel, a 20-bed hostel and 45,100 square feet of retail space on about 62 acres of the site while preserving about 310 acres as open space with public trails. The remainder of the land would be used for parks and roads.
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The open space preservation hinges on the California Coastal Commission approving the development proposal, according to the Land Trust, which serves as steward of the space that would be preserved.
“Without the project, the land would stay as an oil field for the foreseeable future,” said Robyn Vettraino, executive director of the Land Trust.
“We felt that a lot of people were misinformed about what’s going on here,” Vettraino said. “We figured the best way to inform people is to hold an educational tour.”
The Banning Ranch Conservancy, which opposes development of the site, says the property contains valuable and sensitive habitat that must be protected under the state Coastal Act.
Bill McCarty, who attended the tour Wednesday, took issue with the idea that the land couldn’t be cleaned up and preserved as open space without development.
“They engage in a lot of ‘all or nothing’ thinking in that respect,” he said. “There are alternatives. We need to preserve the coastal open space that we are so short of in Southern California.”
The Banning Ranch Conservancy has indicated its desire to buy the property but has not raised enough money to make that possible.
Newport Banning Ranch originally proposed 1,375 homes, 75,000 square feet of retail space, a hostel and several parks on about 95 acres of Banning Ranch. That plan was approved by the Newport Beach City Council in 2012. However, the project has since been scaled back at the behest of the Coastal Commission, which has final say over development along California’s coast.
In November, Newport Banning Ranch sent the commission its current plan, for which commission staff recommended approval but included conditions that would further reduce the project’s footprint.
The developer decided to delay going before the commission for a vote in May, saying some issues remained unresolved and that it needed more time to review the staff’s proposal.
Most recently, Newport Banning Ranch asked Coastal Commission staff to ease some restrictions for the site to allow more space to build.
The project is expected to go before the 12-member commission in September.
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Hannah Fry, hannah.fry@latimes.com
Twitter: @HannahFryTCN
