City, Citizens Deserve to Be Commended : * Collaborative Effort Helped Bring About Compromise to Encroachment Problem

If government by committee too often produces bland policy or toothless compromise, then a collaborative effort by city officials and citizens in Newport Beach shows that the reverse can be true.

The City Council a year and a half ago set up a committee made up of homeowners association leaders, the city attorney and representatives of various public departments and boards to find an acceptable compromise to a decades-old problem in Newport Beach--the encroachment of seawalls, patios and landscaping out from oceanfront properties onto the beach.

This difficult task was conducted with only one certainty, that not everyone would be happy with the results. The committee has just seen its labor come to fruition in the city’s adoption of a new policy that will allow more than 200 beachfront residents to keep their encroachments by paying annual fees, and by requiring about 78 to rip out part of their patios or landscaping.

The Encroachment Committee doggedly reviewed nonconforming uses elsewhere in the city, and it combed the Southern California waterfront to see how other cities and government agencies had handled similar problems.

The goal was to come up with something that the California Coastal Commission would accept. Commission review must now follow, but the committee should get an “A” for effort in its work to bring this tedious process to this point.

The suggestions recognize the folly of requiring everyone to tear down existing patios, which would have been unfair.

The committee advised, and the council accepted, different degrees of encroachments onto the beach, depending on what part of town they occur in. Some areas will be allowed to have 15-foot encroachments, and others will be allowed up to 7 1/2 feet.

The fee agreed to by the council was a high $600 annual rate in some cases, and $300 in others, as opposed to the $200 that the committee had agreed to. This, in part, is a way of convincing the commission, which must agree to the policy, that the city is serious about regulating encroachments.

The fees are steep, but the good news is that they will go toward improving public access along the waterfront, including free trolley service from parking lots to the beach, a desirable goal for Newport Beach.

The city is to be commended, and other waterfront communities may want to take a look at this successful long-range effort.