Huntington Pier Parking Garage Given State OK

The state Parks and Recreation Commission Tuesday granted the City of Huntington Beach’s request to build a controversial beachfront parking garage beside the municipal pier.

The commission, however, rejected the city’s bid to construct a 10,000-square-foot restaurant atop the garage, a building that city planners considered “desirable” and opponents called “unnecessary.”

That rejection and another stipulation by the commission spelled partial victories for opponents of the multistory parking garage, many of whom accused city officials of unfairly trying to subsidize a downtown developer’s private enterprise on state property.

Commissioners stipulated that city officials find another location besides the garage to replace 250 parking spaces that will be lost when the Pierside Village development is completed just south of the Huntington Beach Pier.

Pierside developer Bryant Morris was required by the city to help pay for parking space his shopping village would displace.

“We can live without it,” Hal Simmons, the city’s principal planner on the project, said Tuesday of the rejected restaurant. Simmons also said, “We can probably squeeze” the 250 spaces into two other parking garages being planned for the downtown area “although we felt having those spaces right there at the beach would have been better.”

Before a capacity crowd of about 275 people, the state panel held a public hearing on the issue Tuesday morning in Huntington Beach City Council chambers. Forty-six people--about evenly divided between opponents and supporters of the proposed parking structure and restaurant--addressed the commission during the 4 1/2-hour meeting.

Among those who spoke were representatives of the Huntington Beach Chamber of Commerce and the local board of realtors, traditionally supporters of new development, who urged approval of the parking garage and restaurant. Members of Huntington Beach Tomorrow and a splinter group, Huntington Beach Cares, both of which endorse slow-growth, urged the commission to torpedo the plan--particularly the restaurant.

In voting 7 to 1 for the parking garage without a rooftop restaurant, the commission did not specify how many levels, nor how many parking stalls, the structure should have. City planners have said they expect the garage, which will sit immediately north of the pier in the heart of the city’s downtown redevelopment area, to have more than 1,000 parking spaces, but no more than three levels.

Huntington Beach owns the beach south of the Huntington Beach Pier that falls within city boundaries. The 2.3-mile stretch of beachfront north of the pier, however, is state property that the city has been leasing since February. In order to build on that land, the city had to get the state commission’s approval of a master plan detailing the project.

The commission makes recommendations to the California Department of Parks and Recreation on bond issues, land-use operating agreements with cities and counties and land-use designations, and those recommendations are final.

Larger Plan

The beachfront parking garage was the most controversial part of a larger plan known as the Bolsa Chica State Beach General Plan Amendment, which calls for the city to make public improvements to the 2 1/2-mile stretch of state-owned coastline. The Huntington Beach City Council, by a vote of 4 to 3, approved a plan Nov. 2 that included the parking structure and the restaurant. The Huntington Beach Planning Commission previously had rejected the restaurant at a Sept. 15 meeting.

Opponents of the parking garage and restaurant had said that the structures would block ocean views and that the garage should be built on the inland side of the road rather than on the sand side of Pacific Coast Highway. The garage will sit on an existing parking lot immediately north of the pier, near the corner of Main Street and PCH. It will be topped by a landscaped park that will be about level with the coastal highway.

In allowing Huntington Beach to construct the parking garage, the commission stipulated that the building must not obstruct ocean views from the street and required that it be terraced toward the sand to enhance the view from the beach inland.

The commission required that the city submit design plans for the parking garage along with its application for a conditional use permit, one city planner said.

The city now must present to the Huntington Beach Planning Commission, then the state Parks and Recreation Commission, specific design plans, to include details of the location and number of parking stalls, restrooms and elevator shafts. A Planning Commission decision on the design plans could be appealed to the City Council, and ultimately to the California Coastal Commission, city planners said.