HUNTINGTON BEACH : Eminent Domain OKd for 2 Ellis Lots

An Orange County Superior Court judge has approved the city’s plan to acquire through eminent domain two narrow lots that are needed to widen a stretch of Ellis Avenue.

Under the ruling Tuesday, the city will take possession of an adjacent pair of 25-by-110-foot parcels in 30 days. The court has not ruled on how much the city will have to compensate the co-owners for the properties.

The decision comes after the city had worked for eight months to acquire seven similar lots along Ellis Avenue from owners who have rejected the city’s offers to buy their properties.

The narrow strips of land were created in 1910 when Encyclopaedia Britannica offered the lots as promotional gifts with a purchase of a set of books.

Tuesday’s ruling on the two parcels co-owned by Margaret Lindsay and Elmer Olson could clear the way for the city to obtain the remaining five lots, according to Dan Brennan, the city’s director of real estate services.

The city hopes to acquire the lots to add two lanes to Ellis Avenue west of Golden West Street. That stretch is now a two-lane road, which must be improved to serve a planned housing development in the area.

Lindsay and Olson said they bought four contiguous lots eight years ago--two lots fronting Ellis Avenue and two back lots--in hopes of building on the land. But subsequent city zoning laws mandated that only parcels totaling at least five acres may be developed.

Newport Beach-based Dahl Development Co., which plans to build the housing tract, is the largest landowner in the undeveloped area south of Ellis Avenue. The remaining owners were left with useless strips of land, many of whom sold their lots to the city for $10,000 each.

The city has offered the same price for each of the remaining seven lots. But the owners have argued that their properties are worth more, noting that they are taxed on an assessed value of $13,000. Two years ago, Lindsay said, two of the lots sold for a total of $65,000.

“But they’ve just pushed us out and grabbed our land,” Lindsay said.

Lindsay said she will continue to fight for a selling price that she considers fair.

In the meantime, the street-widening and tract development is expected to get under way after the city acquires the remaining lots. Brennan said he hopes that construction will begin by this fall.