Hearings Begin for Dana Point Headlands Resort

After two decades of debate, the showdown finally began Tuesday night over the future of the Dana Point Headlands, one of the county’s last undeveloped coastal properties.

About 150 people packed a City Council meeting, deeply divided over whether a $500-million resort proposed for the 121-acre bluff top above Dana Point Harbor will be a key to the city’s financial future or the devastation of an important natural resource.

It was the first of at least three public hearings before the council votes on the plan.

A coalition of environmentalists, including local representatives of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, have long declared the hotel-residential project too massive and insensitive to the plants and animals on the property.

Their cause was aided Feb. 1 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed the Pacific pocket mouse--known to live only on the Headlands--on the emergency endangered species list. A colony of 39 of the hamster-like mice was discovered last summer during an environmental survey of the property.

“The Dana Point Headlands is truly a unique place on the Earth,” said Michael Redding of San Juan Capistrano, a local Sierra Club representative. “It’s home to threatened (animal) species. You will be inviting litigation from one side or the other if you approve the project before you.”

But the project’s supporters, including the Chamber of Commerce, maintain that the city of 34,000 people needs the estimated $2 million a year in revenue the development would generate.

“Almost everybody in Dana Point has a deep appreciation of the property and it will always be utmost in our minds,” Jody Tyson, the chamber’s executive director, said before the meeting. “But if we have a quality development up there, it will open up the land to more people than ever before while still providing economic development to the city.”

Tyson called the parcel “the only open space we have left in the city” and the only chance to generate revenue “to put more police protection on the streets.”

The Headlands is owned by the Newport Beach-based M.H. Sherman Co. and Chandis Securities. Chandis Securities, a firm that oversees the financial holdings of the Chandler family, is a principal stockholder of Times Mirror Co., which publishes the Los Angeles Times.

The landowner wants to build a five-star, 400-room hotel, two commercial centers and 394 homes. More than 34 acres of parkland, including Dana Strand Beach, will be made public if the project is approved by the council.

No developer has been chosen to build the project.

Because of concerns from local residents and the city Planning Commission, the proposal was reduced to less than half of an earlier plan approved in 1978 by the California Coastal Commission, said Dan T. Daniels, the president of the M.H. Sherman Co. Daniels added that the Headlands is hardly pristine, having first been graded by developers in 1927.

“This is not an undeveloped parcel,” Daniels said. “For about 30 years, the property has been occupied by a 90-unit trailer park and a nursery.”

Although the trailer park has been removed, the nursery and several homes now stand on the property.

Daniels said he did not believe the listing of the Pacific pocket mouse should delay city approval of the project. The mice were found in a four-acre section of the property planned for residential development.

In environmental documents prepared for the project, the landowner suggested that relocating the mice to a similar habitat would save them from cats and other predators while allowing the development to proceed.

“We’ve already had conversations with Fish and Wildlife and they are saying it’s certainly too early to preclude relocation,” Daniels said. “That’s not a dead deal.”

If the council approves the project, it would then move to the California Coastal Commission for approval.