HUNTINGTON BEACH : Battle Over Bay Club Nears End

After nearly a decade of unrealized plans and constant skirmishes with neighbors, the owners of the Huntington Harbour Bay Club are selling it to a condominium developer.

Owners Ferydoun and Doris Ahadpour plan to close the facility April 1. They are selling the three-acre site at Warner Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway to the Coultrup Development Co., a Seal Beach-based firm now building condominiums on an adjacent site formerly owned by the club.

Tentative plans call for the former club, which now operates solely as a banquet facility, to be replaced by townhouses and single-family houses, developer Jon T. Coultrup said.

The move not only marks the end of the affluent area’s once-thriving recreation hub, but also rids owners and neighbors of a mutual migraine that spanned the 1980s.

When the Ahadpours bought the club in August, 1980, they envisioned transforming it into a lush boating and tennis resort and condominium community. Instead, they ran into a series of snags, stemming from the city’s land-use designation 25 years ago that the property be maintained exclusively for recreational use.

Although that land-use stipulation expired soon after the couple bought the property, residents banded together to fight the Ahadpours’ development proposal, a squabble that ultimately erupted into a three-year legal battle.

The owners prevailed in court, but the time and money spent eventually convinced them to abandon the idea of completing the project themselves, Doris Ahadpour said.

“All the trouble had drained us so much, we just figured, hey, let somebody else do it,” she said.

The couple sold the first half of the property--another three-acre site targeted for the condominium development--to Coultrup last year, with hopes of retaining the club’s banquet room.

The Ahadpours had planned to convert the now-disheveled tennis courts into a parking lot to alleviate the problem of parking that spilled onto neighboring streets, angering residents and city officials.

But, concerned that additional parking still might not solve the problem to the city’s satisfaction, the Ahadpours decided to scrap those plans too.

Wedding receptions and other events scheduled after March have all been canceled and deposits returned.

For the neighboring homeowners, all of this is good news.

Residents have charged that for 10 years the Ahadpours have irrevocably damaged the adjacent docks at the marina, failed to respond to a state Coastal Commission mandate to keep the beach open for public access and created noise and parking problems.

Many of the neighbors say they are displeased about Coultrup’s plans for 36 condominium units, approved by the City Council last week, but they say things could be worse.

“Let’s just say this is the better part of two evils,” said Norm Smith, president of the Huntington Harbour Property Owners Assn. “We’d still much rather have open land there, but now we’re at a point where we think we can work with Coultrup and see that there’s development that is acceptable to everyone.”

The Ahadpours, meanwhile, are likely headed for semi-retirement, Doris Ahadpour said.

“We’re not developers,” she said. “God knows what we’ll do in the future, but it won’t be developing.”