For Huntington Beach, Growth Remains Issue

Maybe it’s because two of the three victorious Huntington Beach City Council candidates are teachers that semantics seemed so important Wednesday.

“I hope you’re not going to say I’m pro -growth,” said an alarmed Jim Silva, the apparent top vote-getter in a 15-candidate race. “I’d say responsible growth. Yeah. Say that.”

“Well, I think it would be better,” added winner Don MacAllister, “to say that I’m a controlled pro-growth person but, of course, I don’t think growth is a bad word.”

Incumbent Peter Green, Golden West College biology professor and environmentalist, tends to wear his slow-growth label a little more comfortably.

“Well, yes, I’m happy to be called a slow-growther,” said Green, who spent the morning with his zoology and ecology students dissecting the election instead of insects Wednesday. “But I put more of an emphasis not on traffic but on open space.”

If the unofficial final tallies from Tuesday’s election hold, the future may hold a lot of disappointing votes for Green, a founder of the Amigos de Bolsa Chica group trying to preserve and restore the wetlands after which the group is named.

“I think there is definitely going to be a 5-2 pro-growth block now,” fourth-place council candidate Geri Ortega, who co-wrote the city’s slow-growth measure, said with a sigh. “We had people power, and they had money power.”

Tilt to More Rapid Growth Predicted

The results of the crowded race to run the county’s third-largest city may trigger a shift in the direction of Huntington Beach, with some saying a greater tilt toward more rapid growth is ahead.

Millions of dollars stand to be made by developers and the city in Huntington Beach’s downtown Mediterranean renaissance--a planned 336-acre spread of oceanfront hotels, restaurants, condos and commercial centers on Pacific Coast Highway from Beach Boulevard northwest to Golden West Street.

Silva and MacAllister were the candidates endorsed and financed by most of the big developers in town--most noticeably the Huntington Beach Co., a Chevron subsidiary that is the largest single owner of undeveloped land in the city of 187,000.

Silva is an economics teacher at Los Amigos High School in Fountain Valley, a real estate investor and a city planning commissioner. MacAllister is a former city councilman and director of Huntington National Bank.