HUNTINGTON BEACH : Initiative Bid Opens to Fight Golf Course

A group of residents Friday launched an initiative drive to require voter approval before the city develops or sells any city park or beach. The city clerk’s office approved the organization’s application to circulate petitions, clearing the way for the start of the signature-gathering effort.

The group, which calls itself Save Our Parks, plans next week to begin collecting the estimated 20,000 signatures needed to qualify the proposed city charter amendment for either the June or November, 1990, ballot, said Debbie Cook, the group’s chairwoman.

If the group fails to gather the required signatures within two months to prompt a June ballot measure, it would have an additional four months to qualify the proposal for November.

“We are very confident that we’ll be able to collect the needed signatures,” Cook said Friday. “We have a number of people, in all parts of the city, who are very excited about this.”

At the heart of the group’s campaign is an effort to prevent the City Council from following through on plans to construct an 18-hole, 105-acre golf course on unimproved land at Central Park, straddling Golden West Street at Ellis Avenue.

Save Our Parks was formed in September after the council’s 5-2 decision to move forward with the golf course, and since then, it has been working with attorneys to forge the wording of the charter-amendment proposal. Members charge that the golf course would cut into land that is now used for a variety of recreational activities, including cross-country running by local high school athletes, jogging, bird-watching and horseback riding.

“Our point, above all, is that the people should decide what this land should be,” Cook said.

Mayor Wes Bannister, who has led the drive for the golf course, said he doubts that the group can muster the number of signatures needed.

But Bannister said he encourages the group’s effort. “I’m glad to see them doing what they’re doing. . . . I think the initiative process is good,” he said. “I don’t necessarily believe in its efficiency, but it least it gets the issues out in the open, where people can get informed about what’s really going on.”

Councilman Peter M. Green, who has joined with Council member Grace Winchell in opposing the golf course, said, “This council has been much more generous to developers than it should be.” He charged that supporters of the course have “jettisoned the democratic process” by excluding resident suggestions about the fate of the Central Park land.

Bannister and others promoting the golf course say that the city cannot afford to renovate the targeted land for passive park use. He estimates it would cost the city $10 million to landscape and light the unimproved area.

Under the golf course plans, however, the city would lease the land to American Golf Corp., which would build the course, and the resulting revenues would bolster the city’s general fund by $200,000 to $500,000 per year, Bannister said. Opponents strongly challenge those figures, pointing out that the city’s Meadowlark Golf Course, a facility of comparable size, brings in about $100,000 annually.

The city is required under a relocation agreement with Ocean View Mobile Home Park residents to construct a nine-hole golf course at Central Park. However, that course could be as modest as a “pitch-and-putt” facility and an 18-hole course is not necessary, park preservationists say.

In addition to preserving the Central Park land, the group’s initiative seeks to block the city’s Pierside Village project, a $26-million plan calling for four restaurants and 20,000 square feet of retail shops along the south side of the now-closed city pier, and to preserve undeveloped bluff areas at Bolsa Chica State Beach, Cook said.