Huntington Beach Asks Delay in Senate on Bolsa Chica Bill

The Huntington Beach City Council voted Tuesday night to seek a delay in the introduction of a state bill seeking to establish a governing district for development of a $300-million marina and housing project in the environmentally sensitive Bolsa Chica wetlands.

In case state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) is unwilling to delay her bill for a year while key city concerns are resolved, the City Council scheduled a June 9 public hearing on the bill. Council members indicated that they would then take a position on the measure.

Bergeson aide Randy Hicks, who attended Tuesday night’s council meeting, where an overflow crowd overwhelmingly opposed the bill, said he could not comment on how the senator would respond to the city’s request for a delay. Bergeson put the bill on hold last year when it ran into opposition in the state Legislature.

Reservations Expressed

Each of the seven council members expressed reservations over various aspects of the bill before voting, 4 to 2, to seek the delay.

City Administrator Paul Cook had recommended that council members oppose the measure outright because “the latest changes incorporated into the bill have eroded protections that the city has fought to have included within the bill.”

Bergeson’s chief of staff, Julie Froeberg, disputed Cook’s assessment. She said the city has blasted some amendments it played a hand in drafting and, in fact, never responded to requests to take a role in writing specific language in amendments it was chiefly concerned with--having to do with beach erosion and wetlands restoration.

Before Tuesday’s meeting, four council members had said they were prepared to oppose the bill outright, throwing into question what local support remains for the bill.

“Basically, the senator has been very insistent on making sure there is local support for this, and that has meant, in the past, city and county support,” Froeberg said earlier Tuesday.

The bill would establish a district that could levy fees and govern early stages of a development planned by Signal Landmark Inc., the largest of several landowners in the Bolsa Chica project.

5,700 Homes Proposed

Signal has proposed building 5,700 homes and a 1,400-slip marina with a navigable ocean entrance in an unincorporated area south of Warner Avenue along Pacific Coast Highway--land now under the jurisdiction of the Board of Supervisors. The county approved the plan in 1985, but the state Coastal Commission has withheld final approval pending feasibility studies on the ocean entrance by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The bill would also provide some money to restore 915 acres of environmentally sensitive wetlands.

Cook’s report to the council concluded: “The beach erosion and wetlands protections have been weakened, the costs and who bears them are even more vague, and the district is given even broader municipal-type taxing powers that could supersede the city’s or the people’s governing authority.”

Cook had urged the council to ask Bergeson to withdraw the bill until “all technical studies and planning matters with regard to the Bolsa Chica have been considered and acted upon” by an array of state and federal government agencies.

If it is not withdrawn, the city will send a letter to Bergeson, state Assemblyman Byron Sher and “other appropriate state legislators and officials, expressing strong opposition” to the bill, Cook said. Sher is chairman of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, which is scheduled to consider the bill June 20.

City Council members Ruth Finley, Peter M. Green--past leaders of Amigos de Bolsa Chica, an environmental group that has championed protecting the wetlands--and Grace Winchell have historically rejected any development on the 1,200 acres Signal owns.

Councilman Jack Kelly, who often favors development, said he objects to the bill’s present form because it lacks a “financial road map, so to speak” for whom and how to divide the $250 million in estimated costs to build the proposed marina, realign Pacific Coast Highway and construct a bridge, all of which would be required for the ocean entrance.