SEAL BEACH : Court to Rule on City Housing Plan

An Orange County Superior Court commissioner said Wednesday that he will rule by the end of the month on whether Seal Beach’s plan for accommodating future housing needs complies with state law. The decision could tilt the balance of power in future legal battles between cities and environmental and affordable-housing activists.

The city’s housing plan includes objectives for providing new low-cost housing and rental assistance that are so unrealistic as to be “fraudulent,” said Jonathan Lehrer-Graiwer, an attorney for the Wetlands Restoration Society.

“They picked the numbers out of the air and it looks good on paper but it is totally a sham,” he said Wednesday after the court hearing.

Lehrer-Graiwer cited projections in the plan which say that as many as 487 units of low- and moderate-income housing could be built on vacant sites in the city by 1994. That number far exceeds the 294 units recommended by the state.

Critics say the units are proposed for land unsuitable for such housing, including a working oil field and property zoned for light manufacturing.

Seal Beach Development Director Lee Whittenberg said the city’s plan meets state requirements.

“State law says that you need to provide a general guideline,” he said. “It does not require that you specify what land you’ll zone five years from now. There’s no way to predict that.”

But Lehrer-Graiwer wants Commissioner Ronald L. Bauer to do something no other judge in Orange County has ever done: look beyond whether a city has adopted a housing plan and decide whether it is a good-faith effort or just a paper exercise written to comply with state law.

He wants Bauer to declare the housing plan invalid until the city provides more specific information on how the plan’s objectives will be met. Lehrer-Graiwer also wants the judge to order the city to explain why programs in Seal Beach’s 1982 housing plan were not carried out.

City Atty. Michael G. Colantuono said such a ruling would make the court a “superplanner,” violating constitutional separation of powers.

“To strike down the housing element (of Seal Beach’s General Plan) would take the court out of its proper role and insert it into city government in a way our Constitution doesn’t permit,” he said.

Attorneys for both sides agreed that such a decision would go further than any previous ruling in the state involving city housing plans and would encourage activists to go to court to block new developments or to force cities to make stronger commitments to providing low-cost housing.