Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : CITIES : Huntington Beach Told to Replant Marshland

Last December, when Huntington Beach officials spent $12,000 on a mosquito abatement project, they never guessed that a federal agency would accuse them of violating the Clean Water Act.

But last week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the city failed to get a federal permit when it bulldozed three acres of marshland, had disturbed a valuable nesting area for songbirds in the process, and had violated the Clean Water Act to boot.

To remedy the damage, EPA enforcement coordinator Robert Leidy said the city would have to replant the cattails, willows, mulefat and other wild grasses that it ripped out.

“We concur that they have to control mosquitoes,” he said, but “they have to do it in a way to minimize the impact on wildlife.”

City Atty. Gail Hutton said she didn’t know whether the city would fight the order or comply. But she said, “I’m not sure that, because the EPA says we’ve committed a crime, we have to jump through 50 hoops that second.”

If the city does replant, it won’t come cheap. A San Juan Capistrano nursery owner who sells native plants estimated that the effort could cost $6,000 an acre. But earlier, a federal biologist estimated costs could run as high as $25,000 an acre. Meanwhile, Dick Kust, an Audubon Society leader who objected to the bulldozing, estimated that it could be five years before the replanted marshland comes back.

Before the bulldozing, more than 40 species of birds regularly bred in the marsh and about 200 birds, including bushtits, northern orioles and ruddy ducks, were sighted there in the last four years, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials have said.