Landowners Bogged Down : Zoning Restricts Prime Acreage to Wetlands, Prompting Lawsuit

Birds feed in marshy pools. Ocean breezes bend natural grasses and plants. Nothing man-made rises from the ground.

This unusual piece of coastal land could be mistaken for a nature preserve, but it’s no park. It’s private property. And a legal battle over its fate is drawing attention from environmentalists and business interests alike.

At issue is the proposed development of 66 acres near the heart of this city of 185,000. The open land lies across the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington State Beach. Hundreds of expensive houses crowd the tract’s boundary, making the land stand out as an undeveloped island in an urban sea.

Few such big blocks of privately owned, vacant coastal wetlands exist anywhere in Southern California.

The land would be worth many millions of dollars if developed, but city and state agencies have prohibited any building on the tidelands, urging instead complete restoration of the property to its natural state.

“If they (the landowners) win, the court would be saying, ‘We don’t care about wetlands,’ ” said Gary Gorman, executive director of the nonprofit Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy.

Adrienne Morrison, executive director of the Amigos de Bolsa Chica, said: “Wetlands are at a premium in California. A loss in this case would be a dangerous precedent, because the attack is on the state Coastal Act, and that act was passed by the voice of the people. It could be a dangerous precedent.”

But the landowners contend that the restrictions on development amount to a seizure of the land by the government, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

“This isn’t a fight against wetlands,” said Michael G. Yoder of Irvine, one of the attorneys representing the owners, Pacific Enviro Design, which owns 21 acres, and Coastal Magnolia Group, which has title to 45 acres, both of Rancho Cucamonga.

“If the state wants to restore this land to a wetlands, that is fine,” Yoder said. “But the state should be willing to pay the fair market value for the land.”

The owners allege in a lawsuit filed last summer in Orange County Superior Court that the restrictions imposed by the city and the Coastal Commission on the land amount to illegal seizure of private property.

Neither the state nor the city has sought to buy the land. But both were jointly involved in the zoning of the property as “coastal conservation,” a category that does not allow commercial or residential buildings. Some extraction of minerals, such as oil, is permitted.

“The zoning doesn’t give an economically viable use of the property,” Yoder said for the owners.

If the state does not want to buy the land at “a fair price,” he said, the owners should be allowed to develop a mix of residential and commercial uses and open space.

The complex litigation involves more than constitutional issues. For example, the city is arguing that the owners did not buy the property until April, 1990--two months after the land had been given its current, restrictive zoning.

Mark D. Rutter, representing the city, said he will prove that the purchases were made at a time when evidence abounded that it could not be developed.

In the court file, Rutter referred to the owners as “newly arrived carpetbaggers who obtained the ‘worthless’ property less than two years ago and who have made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to obtain city or state approval for any use of the property.”

In contrast, the owners accuse the state of not being frank and open about use restrictions and say they did not learn of all the limits until just last year, when the lawsuit was filed.

A trial in the case is a year away, unless the city and state succeed in winning a dismissal first, the attorneys said.

It is not the first instance of legal combat between the state and the owners, who have challenged as inadequate the amount of money that the state has offered to buy seven acres to widen Pacific Coast Highway from four to six lanes.

The owners are also challenging the state Department of Transportation’s decision to improve sand dunes on the vacant land to protect the wetlands. Yoder accused Caltrans of failing to perform an adequate environmental impact study for that work.

As the legal fight continues, environmentalists said they hope that nothing happens along the way to endanger the wetlands, which are near the newly restored Huntington Beach Wetlands, the Upper Newport Bay Ecological Reserve and the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve.

Morrison of the Amigos de Bolsa Chica said: “I drove by the land recently, and it was full of birds. These are pieces of land that are fast disappearing. We don’t want to lose any more wetlands.”