Home-Builder Offers to Triple Wetlands Area : Development: Bolsa Chica would be expanded to 1,100 acres in exchange for 4,884 homes on perimeter.

Bolsa Chica, Southern California’s largest wetlands, would be tripled in size in exchange for permission to build 4,884 homes on the perimeter under a development plan unveiled Wednesday by the Koll Co.

Although a coalition of local citizens’ groups was critical, charging that the number of new houses would overwhelm the ecologically delicate area, Koll Co. officials said their plan would not harm any of the birds or wildlife in the wetlands.

“Not only will the plan not hurt the Bolsa Chica, this plan calls for enhancing and enlarging the wetlands,” said Lucy Dunn, a senior vice president of the Koll Co. “The plan calls for restoring severely degraded existing wetlands and creating new wetlands. It will be something for not only this community, but the whole nation, to be proud of.”

But Ralph Bauer, a spokesman for CoOp, a coalition of 15 homeowners and other citizens’ groups here, said that 4,884 new homes would be excessive.

“We think any development should be restricted to the higher ground, the Bolsa Chica Mesa area, which contains about 245 acres,” Bauer said. “We think there should only be four homes per acre.” Thus, Bauer added, the coalition believes development should be limited to 980 new residences.

The plan presented Wednesday would expand the wetlands from 300 protected acres to about 1,100. It also calls for cutting a new channel under Pacific Coast Highway, bringing ocean water directly to the marsh. A large new lagoon would be formed just east of the existing wetlands.

But the plan has many hurdles to pass before any of that happens. It must pass an environmental impact study and review by the Huntington Beach Planning Commission and City Council. While the Bolsa Chica is outside the city limits, Huntington Beach is in the process of annexing it.

Huntington Beach Mayor Peter M. Green, a Golden West College science professor, praised the Koll Co. plan on Wednesday and said it is environmentally sound.

“I was among the founders of the Amigos de Bolsa Chica, so I have long been involved in the effort to save the wetlands,” the mayor said.

Bolsa Chica, which means little pocket in Spanish, is a natural coastal salt marsh between Seal Beach and Huntington Beach. The marsh originally covered 2,300 acres before settlers moved in and started draining the land around the turn of the century. Today only about 300 acres of the wetlands are state-owned and protected for wildlife use.

Environmentalists during the past 20 years have fought vigorous battles to keep creeping suburban development from taking what is left of Bolsa Chica. About 10 years ago, Orange County developers were on the verge of success in an attempt to make the marshland into a posh new marina, adjoining the existing Huntington Harbour.

But the environmental group Amigos de Bolsa Chica succeeded in defeating that plan. Two years ago, the Amigos and representatives of the major landowner, Signal Landmark, hammered out a compromise that also had the approval of state, county and Huntington Beach governments. That compromise called for allowing some housing development around Bolsa Chica in exchange for Signal Landmark’s donating a substantial amount of acreage for wetlands.

Signal Landmark is a subsidiary of Henley Properties, which last year hired the Newport Beach-based Koll Co. to handle the Bolsa Chica development plans. On Wednesday, the Koll Co. made public its proposed development plans at a reception at the Waterfront Hilton Hotel here.

The multigovernment compromise of 1989 called for up to 5,700 houses to be built on land around the Bolsa Chica. Koll’s plan presented Wednesday thus is a reduction of about 900 houses.

“If the Koll Co. would hold four more press conferences, each time reducing the size by another 1,000 houses, we’d be in good shape,” Bauer joked on Wednesday. But he added: “This is a matter of alternatives. The Koll Co. is offering its alternative, and we are offering ours.”

CoOp is an acronym for Consortium of Organizations Planning for Bolsa Chica. The coalition represents 15 Huntington Beach homeowner and civic-betterment groups and claims a total membership of 10,000 people.

The Amigos de Bolsa Chica is not among the members of CoOp. And on Wednesday the Amigos neither praised nor criticized the new proposal.

“What they (the Koll Co.) presented is the first cut,” said Adrianne Morrison, executive director of the Amigos. “We’ll be watching as time goes on. Plans change and evolve.”

Orange County Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder praised the plans. She said she has been working for almost 20 years for some way to restore the existing wetlands and expand the area with new wetlands acreage. The Koll Co. plans allow such preservation, Wieder said.

“I didn’t think this would come about in my lifetime,” Wieder said. “The primary goal is restoration of the wetlands, and that’s what we’re getting here.”

The plan also calls for the company to donate about 50 additional acres of non-wetlands land to Orange County for a proposed regional park adjoining the Bolsa Chica. That proposed park, long in the planning stage, is called the Linear Regional Park. The new regional park would link Huntington Beach’s existing Central Park to the ocean by way of a narrow, or linear, strip of land.

Koll officials said that if the plan passes all governmental hurdles, construction of houses would start in 1994.

Building New Wetlands

The Koll Co. has released its plans to build 4,884 homes on the bluffs above the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in exchange for tripling the size of the reserve’s wetlands.