HUNTINGTON BEACH : City Leaders Hope to Maintain Open Space

Preserving open space, maintaining a community of single-family homes and ensuring an economic plan to pay for services tops city leaders’ vision for the future of the city.

Council members Monday expressed their views for a new General Plan, which will act as a foundation for development decisions over the next 20 years.

Mayor Victor Leipzig envisions a low-density community that has a balance of residential, retail, industrial and open space.

Leipzig said he doesn’t want to see the city become “so dense and so crowded that we have the same quality of life experienced by big cities.”

Councilmen Tom Harman and David Sullivan agreed that the city’s new master plan should address preserving closed school sites as open space, because more recreation facilities are needed in the city.

“I can see these sites disappearing before our noses, then we’ve lost a tremendous amount of open space,” Harman said.

A citizens advisory committee spent more than three years to prepare a draft General Plan. The last comprehensive General Plan update was in 1976.

The Planning Commission has begun to hold public hearings on the plan and final adoption by the council isn’t expected until early 1996.

In other action, the council expressed outrage and opposition to any proposal by Orange County officials to take property or sales tax revenues from cities to bail out the county from bankruptcy.

Leipzig said the city estimates it could lose between $3 million to $5 million should such a plan be adopted.