Judge to Rule on Batiquitos Cleanup Suit : Habitat: Fight between state panel and environmentalists on how to renovate lagoon may be decided next week.

A Vista Superior Court judge will rule next week on a lawsuit that has blocked the eight-year struggle to renovate Batiquitos Lagoon, he announced Friday after several hours of legal arguments.

Attorneys for the California Coastal Commission, the city of Carlsbad and the Port of Los Angeles argued against a representative of the Sierra Club and the local chapter of the Audubon Society over how best to enhance the 2 1/2-mile long, half-mile wide stretch of wetland.

The controversial plan backed by the Coastal Commission and other governmental agencies would dredge 2.2 million to 3.1 million cubic yards of material to let ocean tides flush out the stagnating 600-acre lagoon.

“It will disrupt, if you will, over 300 acres of the lagoon,” the Sierra Club attorney Laurens Silver told Superior Court Judge Thomas R. Murphy. “This enhancement project . . . is a project whose success is uncertain. It is an experimental project.”

“While something needs to be done at Batiquitos Lagoon, it is not this project.”

Experts on both sides of the issue fear that, over the next 40 to 50 years, rainwater runoff into the lagoon will deposit unwanted sediment and destroy Batiquitos Lagoon, one of the most important wetland bird habitats in the state, turning it into an upland vegetation site.

The Coastal Commission wants to dredge the lagoon to remove the unwanted sediment, creating a constant water level that would support fish life. But water that deep would reduce the nesting area for birds.

The Sierra Club argues that, if the state simply removes the obstacles to the ocean, natural tide flow will keep the lagoon alive. But development interests and homeowners prefer the deeper dredging because it gives the surrounding houses a water view.

Silver said the dredging plan would disrupt the habitat of the birds that nest at the lagoon, particularly the California least tern and the belding savannah sparrow, both of which are endangered species and use the lagoon as a nesting area.

Silver also argued that the motivation behind the dredging project has been the need of the Port of Los Angeles to restore a deep-water wetlands area in exchange for allowing the port to destroy similar habitats in their area for future expansions. The port has offered to pay the $30 million needed for the project.

Jamee Patterson, the attorney for the Coastal Commission, vehemently denied that the Port’s need for mitigation credits had any role in developing the lagoon’s restoration plan and said the port’s financial support for the dredging does not guarantee it mitigation credits.

Patterson told the court that Silver was making an “unduly restrictive” interpretation of state statutes that prohibit dredging of wetlands that would cause “substantial disruption” of the habitat.

“Nowhere does the statute say that wetlands can’t be dredged, and nowhere does it say that wetlands can’t be disturbed,” Patterson said.

She argued that “the short-term disruptions are not strong enough to defeat the long-term enhancements of the project.”

The lagoon is one of 19 high-priority wetlands designated by the state Department of Fish and Game. In 1984, the Coastal Conservancy, the agency charged with protecting the state’s coastal resources, began studying the lagoon’s preservation.

If Murphy were to rule in favor of the dredging plan, dredging would begin in the fall of 1993 after final designs for the dredging are drawn up and the nesting seasons of the least tern and savannah sparrow have ended, said Gary Wayne, assistant planning director of Carlsbad.