Wetlands’ Amigos Loses Some Old Friends : Environment: The once-tiny wetlands group is now a major player near the decision-making process, but critics accuse it of selling out by supporting development.

Spurred by a League of Women Voters study purporting to show the detrimental effects of a marina proposed for the Bolsa Chica wetlands, eight concerned citizens gathered at Herb Chatterton’s house here one evening in 1976.

“We thought of it as a local issue,” said Chatterton, now a Sony Corp. executive living in Irvine. “None of us had any track records as environmentalists at that point. So we just organized a group, picked a name for it, and we were off and running.”

The name was Amigos de Bolsa Chica, and the group’s avowed purpose was to work for the protection and restoration of the state’s largest unprotected stretch of coastal wetlands south of San Francisco.

“It was just a hobby, not a career,” Chatterton said.

But in the 19 years since its formation, Amigos de Bolsa Chica has evolved from what might have been described as a bunch of citizen activists to a powerful environmental group near the center of decision-making in Huntington Beach.

“The Amigos are a major player,” said Mayor Victor Leipzig, a former Amigos president. “It’s about as successful an environmental organization as you can find.”

“They are very well respected,” said Peter Green, a city councilman and Amigos member. “They work with the Chamber of Commerce and the Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau. They’ve come out of the trenches and begun to negotiate an armistice.”

In fact, six of the seven members of the current City Council are among the Amigos’ 1,700 members. Along with Leipzig, two other council members are former Amigos presidents.

Three of the city’s six planning commissioners, two executives of the Koll Real Estate Group--which has received approval from the county Board of Supervisors to build a housing project on the wetlands--and former county Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder are also members.

All three City Council candidates endorsed by the organization won in the city’s most recent election.

Last month’s unanimous approval by the Board of Supervisors of the Koll group’s plan to build 3,300 homes in and around the wetlands was credited in large measure to years of behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Amigos, who tacitly supported the final plan as consistent with their twin goals of minimum housing density and maximum wetlands restoration.

“The Amigos run the city now,” said Flossie Horgan, a founding member of the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, which opposes the plan, after the supervisors’ vote.

In the process, however, the group has also attracted a host of critics. While supporters say that working closely with developers and government officials has allowed the Amigos to exercise an effective form of environmental politics, detractors charge the group with selling out its environmental agenda by cozying up to the opposition.

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“The Amigos are now an anti-environmental group,” said Gordon LaBedz, a spokesman for the Surfrider Foundation, which opposes all development at Bolsa Chica.

Said Bob Winchell, a lifetime Amigos member and longtime Huntington Beach resident: “I’m pretty well disenchanted with the group. They don’t represent the citizens they used to represent. It appears that they are aiding and abetting what Koll is doing to the city.”

Activists on both sides say the turning point in the group’s approach to the Bolsa Chica development came in 1989. Until then, they agree, Amigos de Bolsa Chica was generally acknowledged as the voice of the environmental community on all matters pertaining to the 1,700-acre Bolsa Chica site.

Since 1972, the landowner had been planning a massive development that was to include 5,700 homes, a 1,300-slip marina, two 2,000-foot jetties and an array of oceanfront hotels, shops and restaurants.

After the project won approval from the supervisors in 1985, however, it became bogged down in legal and political challenges, most notably from the Amigos.

Finally, in an attempt to break the logjam, then-Supervisor Wieder and then-Mayor John Erskine formed a group that included representatives from the developer, the state, the city, the county and Amigos de Bolsa Chica.

Meeting regularly from November, 1988, until May, 1989, the group developed an agreement that eliminated the proposed marina, hotels and restaurants, significantly reduced the number of houses and sharply increased the number of wetland acres the developer would restore.

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It was from that 1989 agreement, the Bolsa Chica Planning Coalition Concept Plan, that the current proposal evolved. It calls for the Koll group to spend $48 million to restore 950 acres of degraded wetlands in exchange for the right to build 3,300 homes--including about 900 in the federally designated marshlands.

“We spent hundreds of hours listening, learning and arguing,” said Lucy Dunn, senior vice president of the Koll Real Estate Group. Immediately upon their conclusion, she said, she became an Amigos member. “I grew at that time to respect their organization and the principles they stood for.”

Adrianne Morrison, the Amigos’ executive director, praised the development plan that ultimately resulted from the talks. “The balance has tipped to where the environment is the key part and the housing is only a small element,” she said.

Not all environmentalists agreed, however. In 1992, opposed to what they saw as the Amigos’ capitulation to developers’ interests, some members of the group and others formed the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, an organization that favors complete preservation of the wetlands as open space and has, with various other groups, been at odds with the Amigos ever since.

That opposition has taken various forms.

Recently LaBedz asked the Campaign to Save California Wetlands, a statewide coalition of environmental groups, to remove the Amigos from membership on the grounds that the group “has been taken over by the wetlands developer.”

A spokeswoman for the campaign said no decision had been made on how to respond.

At the Amigos’ annual meeting last month, a group of disgruntled members attempted unsuccessfully to unseat and replace the organization’s leadership. And three weeks ago a coalition of groups filed a lawsuit citing environmental and economic grounds in challenging the project the Amigos, the county and the developer have so painstakingly attempted to mold.

“Accepting 3,300 homes at Bolsa Chica is not a position congruent with an environmental viewpoint,” said Connie Boardman, president of the Land Trust. “Our vision is simply broader; we don’t see how that can guarantee the health of the wetlands.”

Amigos de Bolsa Chica leaders make no bones about their friendly relations with county officials and the Koll Real Estate Group.

“We’ve become very skilled at working within the process,” said Chuck Nelson, the organization’s president. “We’ve been successful and people admire us for having done it in a very intelligent, rational and sensitive way. We have built a reputation in local, state and federal governments.”

Newly elected Supervisor Jim Silva, who represents the Huntington Beach area, agreed: “I think the Amigos have been an overseer of the wetlands for the last 20 years. They have been very visible, have the respect of the community behind them and I have the utmost respect for their integrity.”

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Relations with the development company are also friendly. Every year, according to Morrison, the Koll group contributes $1,000 to help sponsor the Amigos’ annual 10K run, its major fund-raiser. Last year, after the organization’s offices were ransacked, the Koll company donated furniture to the organization. And about twice a month, Morrison said, Amigos leaders meet with Koll executives to discuss mutual concerns.

“We learn from each other and that makes for a better project,” Dunn said. “Back in the 1970s we were bitter adversaries; now I would say that we have a working relationship. We each have our own missions, but Koll has integrated the Amigos’ principles into its planning.”

All of which sounds highly suspicious to Gordon LaBedz.

“My take is that they’re not the same group that they were in the 1970s,” he says of the Amigos. “It’s a Koll-dominated organization now. I consider Amigos de Bolsa Chica as much my enemy as I do the Koll Real Estate Group.”

Times correspondent Debra Cano contributed to this report.