HUNTINGTON BEACH : City to Buy 6.9-Acre Farm--$3.75 Million

A yearlong legal struggle over the purchase of the Ocean View Mushroom Growers farm ended Thursday when Huntington Beach agreed to purchase the property for $3.75 million.

As part of the settlement, the landowner, Huntington Beach resident Victor DiStefano, agreed to drop his lawsuit against the city. DiStefano had alleged that city workers trespassed on the now-closed mushroom farm and that police officers had harassed tenants living there.

The city has been trying to purchase the 6.9 acres for more than four years and filed an eminent domain lawsuit last year to force the sale.

Eminent domain allows a government body to take private land for a public purpose as long as it pays fair market price and receives permission from a court.

The 6.9 acres are along Golden West Street north of Ellis Avenue.

The city wants the former mushroom farm to extend adjacent Central Park and also to temporarily house mobile homes that soon will be displaced by downtown redevelopment.

The battle for the land has gone through changes in property owners and disagreements over price.

With the settlement, DiStefano, 72, can collect his money and the city can take the land, his Newport Beach attorney, Robert Waldron, said Thursday.

“The closing chapter has been written,” Waldron said.

The City Council decided Wednesday in a closed session to settle the case to save on legal costs and to speed up the Riverfront downtown redevelopment project, Councilman Tom Mays said.

If the city had taken DiStefano to trial, the city stood to lose about $6 million in property and bed taxes from the planned hotels in the Riverfront project, Mays said.

The Riverfront project, situated on Pacific Coast Highway near Huntington Street, includes plans for four hotels, a shopping plaza, a health and tennis club and some type of housing, said Susan Hunt, Riverfront project manager for the city’s Redevelopment Agency.

The first phase of the project, a 296-room Hilton Hotel, is expected to be completed by next summer.

Part of the land to be in the Riverfront Project is occupied by the Driftwood Beach Club Mobile Home Park. The city, which owns the land and leases it to the park, has promised to relocate Driftwood residents to the mushroom farm after it makes improvements to the land.

Originally, Huntington Beach offered $1.8 million for the mushroom farm, and earlier this year offered almost $2.4 million. But because property values have skyrocketed in the past few years, the city chose this week to offer more, Mays said.

A city appraiser valued the land at $3.5 million, while an appraiser for the landowner had appraised it at more than $4 million, Mays said.

“We decided that it would be in the best interest of the city now to settle,” he said.