Council OKs Settlement on Oxnard Shores Development

The Oxnard City Council this week approved a settlement of a 16-year dispute that pitted environmentalists and beach-dwellers against the owners of undeveloped oceanfront property at the Oxnard Shores subdivision.

The proposed settlement, which still has to be approved by the California Coastal and State Lands commissions, would allow construction to begin as early as next fall on 73 lots along the damage-prone strand that was subdivided in the 1960s but has been subject to building prohibitions since 1972.

It also lays the groundwork for the resolution of 10 lawsuits, which seek in excess of $40 million from the city, coastal commissioners and Concerned Citizens to Save Oxnard Shores (SOS), a group representing the interests of environmentalists and some residents.

‘Best We’re Going to Get’

“I don’t like every aspect of the agreement but I fear it’s the best agreement we’re going to get,” said Councilman Michael A. Plisky, who moved to adopt the settlement, which passed 3 to 2 after a five-hour hearing Tuesday night. Attorneys representing the city, the state, environmentalists, beach residents and the Oxnard Shores Oceanfront Lot Owners Assn. (OSOLOA) portrayed the settlement as the only alternative to prolonged litigation.

They told council members that failure to approve the settlement would derail a court-mandated schedule. They said the council had to approve the plan by April 5 so the State Lands Commission could consider it in late April and the California Coastal Commission in mid-June.

Parties to the dispute welcomed the settlement. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this,” said Fred Marlowe, the subdivision’s developer who has grown into a frail, 89-year-old man over the course of the three decades since ground was first broken for Oxnard Shores.

‘We Had to Compromise’

“The bottom line is no one wants to see building on the beach but we decided we had to compromise,” said Phil Seymour, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara.

The group had joined with Save Oxnard Shores, a group of residents and environmentalists, in waging a legal battle against construction on the strand. But the two council members who voted against the settlement, Dorothy Maron and Manuel Lopez, complained of being “railroaded” into the decision and noted that they had not had adequate time to review the EIR or minutes of a planning commission meeting on the subject last week.

“I really feel that I’m being pressured and that I haven’t had time to review the material,” Lopez said. At stake are oceanfront lots whose values have escalated dramatically since the neighborhood was subdivided in the 1960s and beachfront lots went for as little as $15,000. A lot in escrow pending a resolution of the lawsuits is selling for $400,000, said Al Zingg, president of the lot owners group that includes more than 80 members. He estimates the value of all the beachfront property at $28 million.

Two Public Parks, Access

Under the proposed settlement, which was disclosed in December, lot owners would give up more than 1,400 feet of property along the beach for two public parks and agree to grant public access to the beach up the coast from the Channel Islands Harbor. In return, they would receive the right to exceed current density restrictions.

The plan would also shrink the lots, and reduce their number from 97 to 73.

In exchange, lot owners would be allowed to build to a height of 30 feet in a neighborhood where previous construction has been restricted to 25 feet. Sideyards between houses would be a scanty 5 feet.

Lot owners would also be allowed to construct a 12-unit apartment building, a pier lined with shops and restaurants, and, on a separate lot on Wooley Road removed from the oceanfront, 70 additional apartments.

Even though the settlement was approved by a 3-2 margin, it has met with considerable opposition.

Members of the Oxnard Shores Neighborhood Council complained that their concerns had not been considered. They predicted that the 30-foot houses, which could be as high as 33 feet when mounted atop pilings, would block views and set a detrimental precedent for construction and remodeling efforts in the subdivision.

The neighborhood council, both SOS and OSOLOA representatives said, was not part of the settlement because they were not party to the suits. City Atty. K. Duane Lyders was the city’s voice in the settlement, they said.

Neighborhood Council representatives also had complained that the settlement smacked of a conspiracy because it would place two public access corridors--one over twice the normal 10-foot width--in front of the house of SOS head William Coopman, while arranging four of nine access corridors beside the property of Norman Linder, who has led the battle for the lot owners, thus buffering his property with beaches.

Linder, the leader of lot owners, said he agreed to access corridors near his property as a “peace-keeping gesture. Who wants the multitudes of humanity walking by?”

May Lose Six Homes

Coopman, meanwhile, said that SOS had no say in the placement of the entryways to the beach.

A resident whose house is protected from the ocean by a rock wall said construction allowed by the settlement would destroy significant portions of the wall. Six homes could be lost, he said. Crafters of the agreement said the owners of houses protected by the rock wall could buy adjoining property to safeguard the wall.

And residents of the nearby Oxnard Dunes neighborhood, who have sought damages against several governmental agencies for allowing construction on an oil sump, complained in a statement that the proposed plan would “only create . . . more innocent victims who would reside in a still uncorrected toxic and contaminated dump site.”

The statement referred particularly to the multifamily residences that would be allowed at the Wooley Road site, which Dunes residents claim suffers from the same underground pollution as their subdivision across the street.

“I don’t threaten litigation--I file it,” had said Paul Dolan, the Dunes resident who has spearheaded that neighborhood’s battles over toxic substances in the soil. “If I have to ride through the Oxnard Shores on this, I will.”

Even the city’s planning commission defeated the environmental impact report spelling out the plan in a split vote last Thursday, with Planning Commissioner Bodine Elias, an Oxnard Shores resident, abstaining.

Commissioner Selma Dressler, who led opposition to the EIR, said that the report failed to take sufficient note of the potential for the plan’s threat to the environment and human safety.

Area residents had expressed concern about access for police and firefighters through the proposed easements.

However, the city’s safety director, Robert Owens, said the five-foot easements would be adequate.

“Naturally, you’d like to be able to drive a car between the houses, but there are all sorts of examples where houses are clustered together and we find a way around that,” Owens said.

Meanwhile, several geologists have said that development on the beach will increase erosion, while other scientists have said that heavy tides pose a threat to houses built on the strand. And they complained that one of the parks provided by the settlement is underwater some portions of the year, as would be the entire length of the beach below the proposed development.

Two storms since 1971 have severely damaged homes along the shore. One uprooted a house owned by the former singing duo Sonny and Cher. And, after the 1971 storm, the shoreline was declared a Federal Disaster Area.

Residents testified Tuesday about occasions when windows facing the ocean were ripped from houses during winter storms. Longtime Oxnard residents said they had witnessed the beach retreat hundreds of feet over the years. Another resident noted that the EIR failed to note that a major fault line lay just offshore from the subdivision.

Loss of Sand Predicted

Others predicted that the development would so erode the shore that the sand would be wiped out from under pilings, leaving the houses high and dry, like islands in the ocean. They pleaded with the council to instead consider floating a bond issue that would buy the property from private holders, ban construction and preserve the entire beach for the public.

The author of the EIR, Eric Sacowitz of Envicom Corp., defended omission of the fault line. “We were dealing with coastal issues,” he said, “not offshore issues.”

The oceanfront property on Oxnard’s western edge was first subdivided and sold by the McGrath family in 1930. The Oxnard Shores Development Co. bought and resubdivided the property between 1959 and 1969. By 1971, 27 homes had been built along the beach.

But a storm that year destroyed some of the houses and severely eroded the beach in front of undeveloped lands. Two residents sued the city for allowing the beachfront construction. No building permit has been granted since 1974 on the beach and a series of suits and countersuits have prohibited construction there. In 1983, the city imposed a building moratorium in the area.

Still, the settlement, which was been approved in principle by the Coastal and State Lands commissions, leaves many open wounds.

Dream Dies

“They’re all bitter,” said Zingg of lot owners. Many have grown old in the battle. Others have died while it was waged.

In 1974, real estate broker Robert Colomb promised his wife, Eloise, that they would eventually retire to their newly purchased beach front property. So enthusiastic was Mrs. Colomb that she began sketching designs for the couple’s dream house.

But the enthusiasm dimmed as legal battles grew increasingly complicated. Then her husband’s health began to falter, and in 1984, a decade after purchasing the property, he died. Now the widow in her mid-60s says she plans to sell the property if the settlement is approved.

“I’ve gone past the age when I’d enjoy it,” she said Monday while overlooking her piece of paradise. “I’d be all alone.”

Current Oxnard Shores residents also have their gripes.

Berry and Marlene Sturgell, for instance, could have begun building their new house anywhere but they recently chose a lot three houses from the beach because of the view.

The 58-year-old retired liquor store operator said he knew beachfront construction might eventually block it, so he planned a rooftop terrace. But now, even before he has completed his house, Sturgell complains that the proposed three-story houses will render the terrace worthless and defeat the purpose of living so close to the beach.

“A guy sitting on the ocean doesn’t need a three-story view but the guy behind him does,” he said.

Even Coopman, the head of SOS, complained that the apparent settlement has taken its toll.

“It’s made a very short-tempered old man of me,” he said.