Carlsbad Moves Ahead With Lagoon Project : Habitat: Environmental groups are frustrated in attempts to derail work on $45-million Batiquitos wetlands restoration plan, which includes dredging.

Step aside, Sierra Club and Audubon Society, the restoration of pristine Batiquitos Lagoon is marching on.

Despite dogged efforts by those environmental groups to prevent any intrusions upon the 600-acre lagoon, considered one of the last unspoiled wetlands in Southern California, Carlsbad city officials said they will proceed with final design work on the $45-million Batiquitos Lagoon Enhancement Project. Construction is expected to begin by 1994.

City Council members and officials from the Port of Los Angeles announced Tuesday that all the costs for the design and preliminary engineering work had been approved. Port of Los Angeles officials, who are paying for the project, estimated that $6 million will be spent before the design work is complete.

Councilwoman Judy Nygaard praised the work of the multitude of agencies involved in the project and heralded the agreement between the city and port officials.

“This is a win-win opportunity for our community and the Port of Los Angeles,” Nygaard said. “It is unprecedented in the entire U.S.”

Nygaard was referring to the unusual arrangement whereby the city of Los Angeles will pay for restoration at a lagoon two counties away. The agreement is actually an exchange designed to offset the expected damage to marine life during the Port of Los Angeles’ own dredging and rebuilding project.

If that project is approved by the California Coastal Commission in October, state law requires that any environmental damage be offset by the restoration of fragile wetlands elsewhere in California. Port officials have targeted Batiquitos Lagoon in Carlsbad and such areas as Ballona Creek in Los Angeles’ Marina del Rey to be the recipients of such mitigating work.

At the 2 1/2-mile-long, half-mile-wide Batiquitos Lagoon, the restoration work includes the installation of jetties at the entrance to the Pacific Ocean, improvements to all five bridges that cross the lagoon and the replacement of one of them, and the installation of a buried rock retaining wall parallel to the beach near the mouth of the lagoon to protect Carlsbad Boulevard during storms.

But the project also calls for the dredging of the lagoon to flush out the stagnating wetlands and to create the deep water environmental habitat that is being lost in Los Angeles. As much as 3.1 million cubic yards of sand and silt that has threatened to further dry up the wetlands would be removed under the proposal.

While the dredging plan has been approved by the state Coastal Commission and Carlsbad officials, it touched off an outcry by local environmentalists who had initially praised the project. Dredging the lagoon, one of 19 high-priority wetlands designated by the state Department of Fish and Game, would be disastrous for the shallow water habitat in the lagoon so vital as a nesting area for hundreds of species of birds, they claim.

All that would be accomplished would be the destruction of one fragile habitat for the restoration of another fragile habitat that is being destroyed elsewhere, they say. They also claim the dredging is being pushed by the port officials, whose only interest is finding a way to make their own harbor project work.

“This project is absolutely wedded to the port district’s plan,” said Joan Jackson, a local spokeswoman for the Sierra Club. “They looked around and, lo and behold, there wasn’t any deep water habitat left. So they looked around again and decided to create some. Batiquitos has lots of acres, so they said, ‘That’s perfect.’ ”

The local lagoon is being sacrificed for Los Angeles Harbor, she said. “It makes little sense to take an already working shorebird habitat and destroy it to create another kind of habitat that is being destroyed in L.A.,” Jackson said. “Shallow water habitat is already very scarce.”

After negotiations between the two parties failed last January, the Sierra Club and the local chapter of the Audubon Society filed a lawsuit to prevent the dredging. When that suit was swept aside in May, an appeal was filed and is pending.

City officials dispute the Sierra Club and Audubon Society charges, saying their project balances the area’s competing environmental needs.