Project Still Faces More in a Long Series of Hurdles : Controversy: Legal challenges are almost certain. The development plan--24 years in the making--must be approved by the Coastal Commission and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Approval by the Orange County Board of Supervisors of the Koll Real Estate Group’s plan to build 3,300 homes in and around the Bolsa Chica wetlands is not likely to end the bitter controversy that has surrounded the project for the last 24 years.

Even before the gavel signaled the end of Wednesday’s meeting, environmentalists and other project opponents were expressing disappointment and threatening legal action to further slow the progress of the massive development, which has been under discussion since 1970.

“This will further damage the last remaining unprotected wetlands south of San Francisco,” said Bruce Monroe, a spokesman for the Sierra Club’s Save Bolsa Chica Task Force. “We need the wetlands to purify our air and produce food. It’s a nursery for fisheries. If you kill the wetlands, you do permanent, irreparable damage.”

Calling Wednesday’s approval of the Koll plan an “arbitrary and capricious” decision showing a lack of concern for the board’s constituency, Monroe said that his group would file a lawsuit challenging the proposed development as damaging to the environment.

“Once the houses are in place,” he said, the Koll Real Estate Group “could spend lots of money and still fail to bring back the wetlands. You can’t bring invertebrates back to life.”

In addition to such legal challenges, the project has other hurdles.

Before the bulldozers can begin their work, county Planning Director Thomas B. Mathews said, the project must be approved by the California Coastal Commission, which is likely to review it this spring. It also will face scrutiny from the Army Corps of Engineers, expected to take action sometime in 1995. And finally, the project must come back to the Board of Supervisors for final ratification, probably next summer.

Plans call for the development to consist of homes ranging from condos or townhouses priced around $200,000 to luxury view homes expected to sell for up to $1 million. The average price of a home at Bolsa Chica, said Lucy Dunn, Koll’s senior vice president, will be about $350,000.

Developers want to begin building in 1996, with completion in 13 to 15 years. But because construction will take place in phases, Mathews said, the first homes could be occupied as early as 1998.

“The process is painfully slow,” Dunn said. “Clearly, though, the county wants to achieve a goal.”

Wednesday’s vote by the supervisors has been a long time coming.

Since 1970, when Signal Landmark, now owned by the Koll Real Estate Group, acquired the property, about 100 development plans have been prepared for the 1,600-acre Bolsa Chica site, according to Dunn. Only one had previously made it as far as the supervisors’ boardroom: an ambitious plan, first proposed in 1972, that included 5,700 homes, a 1,300-slip marina, two 2,000-foot jetties and an array of oceanfront hotels, shops and restaurants.

Then, as now, the plan was strongly opposed by many environmentalists. So, after winning approval from the supervisors in 1985, the project got bogged down in legal and political challenges, most notably from a group called Amigos de Bolsa Chica, then the voice of the environmental community.

In an attempt to break the logjam, Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder and Huntington Beach’s then-Mayor John Erskine formed a coalition that included representatives from the developer, the state, the city, the county and Amigos de Bolsa Chica. Meeting regularly for six months beginning in November, 1988, the group developed an agreement that eliminated the proposed marina, hotels and restaurants, significantly reduced the number of planned houses, and sharply increased the number of wetland acres the developer would restore.

It was from that 1989 agreement, called the Bolsa Chica Planning Coalition Concept Plan, that the current proposal evolved.

The plan, however, was opposed by other environmentalists, who in 1992 formed the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, with the goal of raising enough money to purchase the wetlands and preserve it as open space.

Since then, supported by many environmentalist groups, the trust has held discussions with the Department of the Interior regarding the possible federal purchase of the area or a land swap to save it from development.

The trust wants to preserve the marsh and surrounding upland in part because it is habitat for five endangered bird species: the light-footed clapper rail, Belding’s savanna sparrow, the California least tern, the peregrine falcon and the brown pelican.

The Koll Real Estate Group also contributed to a long delay by switching its development application two years ago from the city of Huntington Beach to Orange County.

The change was made, Dunn said, because the county had greater expertise in wetlands restoration, but critics charge the company with jilting Huntington Beach in the hopes of getting a better deal from the more development-inclined supervisors. The switch was possible because Bolsa Chica, though close to the city, is in unincorporated county territory.

Whatever the reasons for the change, the plan has generated at least eight public hearings--some of them highly emotional--in the last two years, as well as two environmental impact reports prepared by the county.