Lagoon Hotel Foes Upset at Orange County Developer’s Tactics

Rebuffed by the City of San Diego, a land developer is trying to make an end run via the governor’s office in hopes of modifying regulations now preventing him from building a hotel complex in protected wetlands, according to angry local officials and environmentalists.

A public hearing scheduled for today in Del Mar on the disposition of the developer’s property was called only after the state Department of Commerce became involved in the land-use dispute, one state official acknowledged.

At issue is a plan by Birtcher, a Laguna Niguel developer, to erect two 300-room hotels and a shopping center on 30 acres it owns in the San Dieguito River Valley, just south of the Del Mar Race Track and west of Interstate 5. The land, part of 109 acres Birtcher owns in the river valley, is within the San Diego city limits. It is zoned as a floodway and for agricultural uses. Under the San Dieguito Lagoon Enhancement Plan of 1979, the land is ultimately slated for restoration as part of the lagoon.

Political Pressure Charged

“The company is trying to exert political pressure to bypass local control,” said Joanna Louis, a member of Del Mar’s San Dieguito Lagoon Committee. “It’s something that should be left up to the cities of San Diego and Del Mar, not to the governor’s office.”

“What they (the developer) have done is decided that the public be damned, and they want to build a hotel, one or two restaurants and a shopping center, instead of turning it over” to a coalition of local and state agencies, she said.

On Thursday a Birtcher executive acknowledged that the firm encouraged Gov. George Deukmejian’s office to use its influence in setting up Saturday’s meeting. “There are five, seven or eight agencies involved (in the lagoon area), and there wasn’t anyone coordinating them,” said Bob Campbell, a Birtcher general partner.

Among the agencies having some authority or involvement in parts of the west end of the San Dieguito River Valley are the cities of San Diego and Del Mar, the state Department of Fish and Game, the California Coastal Conservancy, the state Coastal Commission and the 22nd Agricultural District.

Local officials, however, differed sharply with Campbell.

“The . . . site they want to build on is entirely within the City of San Diego,” said Del Mar City Councilman John Gillies, who backs lagoon restoration. “It’s not that they don’t know who to talk to; it’s just that they’re not getting the answers they wanted from the local agencies.”

Purchase Alternative

Tim O’Connell, an aide to San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor, concurred, and contradicted Campbell’s assertion that he had not yet received any “official” interest from cities in purchasing the property as an alternative to development.

O’Connor met last month with representatives from Birtcher and various interested agencies to see if today’s Coastal Conservancy-sponsored meeting was “really needed,” O’Connell said. “We said we were kind of interested in buying if they were interested in selling,” he said. “What we found out was that they’re not at all interested in selling. They’re interested in getting permits and developing that property.”

O’Connell thought Campbell was “crazy” to think the city would allow development in the ecologically sensitive lagoon area “in the face of all the work and effort that went into the Lagoon Enhancement Plan.”

In March, Birtcher allowed an application for a General Plan land-use amendment to lapse.

To build on its property, Birtcher would need a host of approvals, including permission from the Coastal Commission, a Torrey Pines Community Plan amendment, a General Plan amendment, an amendment to the North City Local Coastal Program Land-Use Plan, a rezoning and “probably a planned commercial development permit,” said a city planner.

Today’s public hearing, at 9:30 a.m. in the multipurpose room at the Del Mar campus of Mira Costa College, was called by the Coastal Conservancy, acting in its role as an intermediary, said the conservancy’s executive officer Peter Grenell.

Grenell called the meeting at the urging of officials from the state Department of Commerce, he said. Grenell called the role of the Commerce Department minor and limited only to the “potential economic development implications” of the proposed complex. Grenell acknowledged, however, that “ideally the developer should be talking with the city on this.”

Birtcher hopes to make a case at the hearing for a plan prepared by the Department of Fish and Game that calls for the developer to restore wetlands east of I-5 as part of a trade-off to develop the hotels. “We’re talking about donating essentially three-quarters of our land for environmental purposes,” Campbell said. “The Fish and Game report concluded we were not in the sensitive areas and would support exclusion (of the hotel site) from the sensitive areas.”

City officials from San Diego and Del Mar say they will speak at the meeting against development of the site.

Del Mar Councilman Gillies said it is “offensive” to have state officials “coming down here and telling us we ought to have hotels in our lagoon.”

“Seventy-five percent of the California wetlands have been lost since the time of the first European settlements,” Gillies added. “What makes San Diego unique is the river valleys and lagoons. I guess the feeling is that lagoons and wetlands are endangered species. They’re vanishing rapidly. In comparison, hotels and commercial developments are a dime a dozen.”