Wildlife, Debate Flourishing at Ormond Beach : Environment: Endangered species are re-emerging at lagoon since the county left intact a sandbar that in previous years has been bulldozed. But flooded landowners say the area should be drained.

California least terns and other rare and endangered wildlife have returned to a natural lagoon at Ormond Beach in Oxnard in numbers biologists and environmentalists have not seen for years.

The re-emergence of the terns, snowy plovers, brown pelicans and other shorebirds comes after environmentalists and regulatory agencies persuaded Ventura County officials to suspend their annual practice of bulldozing an outlet to the sea.

No outlet will be cut this year until after the season’s fledglings have left their nests in mid-October, according to an agreement reached with Ventura County Flood Control Department officials.

But the lagoon now encompasses several acres and has flooded or threatened nearby private property, and landowners are growing impatient.

The Baldwin Co., a developer that wants to build 5,000 homes in the beach area, started pumping water to alleviate some of the flooding on the company’s property last week.

Baldwin, which has threatened to sue Flood Control, contends the flooding constitutes a condemnation of its land.

Another adjacent landowner, Halaco Engineering, has written Flood Control with worries that rising waters might flood its electrical facilities. In addition, county mosquito abatement officials are pressuring the Flood Control Department to take action now to open the lagoon.

Flood Control has proposed installing its own set of pumps and pipes to lower the water level by two feet, an interim measure that will be discussed today by regulatory agencies.

But the whole scenario worries environmentalists, including Roma Armbrust of the Ormond Beach Observers, who fear Flood Control or Baldwin will completely drain the lagoon, now or in the future.

One recent morning, as Armbrust walked on the beach under a lightly misting sky, least terns protested the intruder by taking to the air and emitting short, high-pitched beeps while snowy plovers and sandpipers scurried along at the water’s edge.

Great and snowy egrets swept their spindly black legs behind them and straightened their crooked necks as they launched into graceful flight.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Armbrust said. “I wish it could stay.”

Her desire is yet to be addressed, as Flood Control, mosquito abatement and the regulatory agencies grapple over how to handle the lagoon.

Mosquito abatement officials in the county’s Environmental Health Department have asked Flood Control to drain or reduce the water level in the lagoon to control insect breeding, which representatives say has soared to 10 times its normal rate in the area.

In addition, as drainage ditches from the city of Oxnard and the Bubbling Springs Creek continue to empty water into the area with no outlet to the sea, a canal near Halaco Engineering is reaching the top of its banks.

Halaco, which melts down aluminum cans for recycling, has written to Flood Control suggesting that the high waters may cause a safety hazard or even death to workers if its facilities are inundated.

“We have high voltage down here,” said Halaco plant manager Dave Gable. “I sympathize with Flood Control having to comply with other agreements, but we have to be concerned about the safety of our people here and the fact that flooding could put us out of business.”

Although once a natural drain for runoff from the Oxnard Plain, the lagoon at Ormond Beach now collects water from gutters and farmland through concrete canals built by Flood Control. The city of Port Hueneme’s Bubbling Springs Creek also drains into the wetland.

The wetland, which supports myriad wildlife, is home to six endangered species, including five shorebirds and, recently, the endangered tidewater goby fish.

*

For its part, Flood Control finds itself in a dilemma, with businesses asking the county to do what it has historically done and open the lagoon, and regulatory agencies and environmentalists pushing it to leave the lagoon intact, at least for now.

“Everyone is looking at us to do something,” said Alex Sheydayi, deputy director of public works.

Flood Control is proposing to pump some of the water out of the lagoon to lower the level to 4.25 feet.

But for long-term solutions, the department has commissioned a study to evaluate the best way to handle the problem. The study will look at whether the sandbar should be breached, whether pumps could be permanently installed to partly drain the lagoon or if there is some other alternative.

But Armbrust, whose group acts as a watchdog for the beach, finds the study suspect from the start.

Impact Sciences, the firm hired by Flood Control to perform the study, is also writing a study for the city of Oxnard on the environmental impacts of the houses and commercial development Baldwin wants to build at Ormond Beach.

“It’s a conflict of interest,” Armbrust said. “We have a developer who wants to develop the land on which the runoff is occurring. It would have been much more prudent for Flood Control to have chosen a firm that was not dealing with an active participant in the development.”

Sheydayi said Impact Sciences was hired because it had done so much work in the area.

“We wanted to take advantage of all the information they already have,” he said. “And these are professional people.”

Carrie Phillips, coastal biologist with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the report will be evaluated by the agencies on its merits and scientific methods. The firm selected is not an issue, she said.

She welcomed the study as a means to learn more about the water flow and habitat of the area so the regulatory agencies could make a well-informed decision on what to do with the lagoon, if anything.

“The bottom line is (that) right now we don’t know exactly what the effects (of the flooding and draining) are because the hydrology of the area has been so altered over the years by farming runoff and Flood Control,” she said.

To cut an outlet to the sea would completely drain the lagoon and very likely reduce the populations of birds and fish.

“Is there something short of an out-and-out breach that would still let them do what they need to do for (flood control and mosquito abatement)? That’s what we hope the study will tell us,” she said.

*

Baldwin officials say, however, they want action now.

“We want the county to stop flooding our property,” said Nick Gorely, senior vice president at Baldwin. “It’s our property and it’s being damaged. Historically, Flood Control has breached the sandbar.”

Baldwin started pumping last week, he said, because the need to alleviate the problem was urgent. He said the flooding prohibited access to the property, which remains vacant while the city of Oxnard develops a plan for the area and studies environmental impacts of development.

Some 40 acres of their property is under water, he said.

“It’s a clear taking-of-land issue,” he said.

But Baldwin officials knew the property was subject to periodic flooding when they purchased the land, said Morgan Boucke, wildlife biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game.

“There may be 40 acres of land that is flooded, but there are more than 30 acres of their land that has been under water all summer long,” she said. “It’s a wetland, and Baldwin was told that when they bought the land.”

In fact, she said, the area is shown as a wetland on maps dating back to the 1850s.

“The sandbar builds up every year as the summer tides are lower and the wave current is not as strong and there is not much water from rainfall coming in,” she said. “The only difference is that they have always gone in and popped it whenever they wanted and they haven’t done that this year.”

Although Sheydayi acknowledges that Flood Control has historically drained the area to prevent flooding and that there is mounting pressure to take some action, he also agreed that the area was a natural drain for the Oxnard Plain long before Flood Control built its channels.

“The channels are our facilities, but I’m not sure we’re really responsible” for the flooding, he said. “The problem down there is in some respects a natural process.”

*

The study now under way should solve the problem for future years, he said. He said the consultant has finished collecting information and that Flood Control will consult with the regulatory agencies to try to come up with a solution. A final report with proposed solutions is expected next year.

But what is really needed in the area, said Fish and Wildlife’s Phillips, is a comprehensive conservation plan for the entire Ormond Beach. That plan would analyze the impacts of all the activities at the beach, one of the last wetlands in the state.

“It’s one of the few coastal wetland systems left in California and one of the very few with a variety of habitats, including the dunes, the uplands, beaches and wetlands,” Phillips said. “So it is a real important area just by scarcity alone.”