Solana Beach Residents’ Protest Fruitless : Board Upholds Earlier Vote on San Elijo Lagoon Project

San Diego County supervisors Wednesday rejected a plea by a group of Solana Beach residents that the supervisors halt plans for a development on the edge of the San Elijo Lagoon.

The board voted unanimously to uphold a Dec. 5 decision giving the go-ahead to the 38-unit Holmwood Canyon project.

The Friends of Holmwood Canyon, a group said by its leaders to include more than 600 people, had asked the board to reconsider its earlier approval. The group contends that the developer and the county’s planning staff misrepresented the project in documents and in statements made at public hearings.

But after listening to the county staff’s point-by-point response to the group’s 16 allegations, board members decided they had no legal basis for reconsidering the previous board’s approval of the project.

Wednesday’s decision was complicated by the fact that three members of the current board were not in office when the Dec. 5 approval was granted.

Supervisor Susan Golding, at whose request the board reviewed the matter, said she wished she could vote on the project rather than the much more limited question of whether to reconsider the earlier vote.

“I personally wish I were voting on the development, but I’m not,” said Golding, who opposed the project during her campaign for supervisor. “We all have to make our decision today based on whether or not there was misrepresentation.”

With that in mind, Golding said she had “heard nothing today that convinced me that there was misrepresentation.”

Jack Peek, an architect who has led the opposition to the project, said after the supervisors’ meeting that he was disappointed with the outcome. He noted that the group will continue to pursue its case through a lawsuit it has filed in Superior Court.

“It seems very unreasonable to ask the people who are accused of wrongdoing to determine if they did anything wrong,” Peek said. “It’s a very strange system.”

The board did reaffirm its desire to have the 16-acre canyon parcel purchased by the county and made into a park.

Negotiations between the developers--Joseph and Donald Balsley of North County--and the San Francisco-based Trust for Public Lands are ongoing. The trust, a private, nonprofit organization, buys environmentally sensitive land that is threatened by development, then sells it to public agencies.

The Balsleys left the supervisors’ chambers immediately after the board’s decision and could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.