Legal Sparring to Start in Bolsa Chica Saga

In courtrooms, living rooms and government offices, the Bolsa Chica wars sputter on.

Even though the hard-fought housing development has won the blessing of a key state panel, no one can say for sure when houses will rise alongside salt marshes next to Huntington Beach.

Next week, lawyers are due to square off in a Santa Ana courtroom, arguing whether Orange County’s environmental review of the controversial Koll Real Estate Group project was flawed.

More legal sparring could loom if environmentalists follow through with plans to sue the California Coastal Commission for its Jan. 11 approval of plans to build 3,300 homes on and around the wetlands. The final federal review of the project could last until late this year, say officials familiar with the project, who hint that approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should not be taken for granted.

The project has drawn widespread attention because the mix of salt marshes and oil fields that makes up Bolsa Chica is considered the largest wetlands ecosystem in Southern California now in private hands.

With the Bolsa Chica debate’s long history already riddled with as many plot twists as a John Grisham novel, few risk predicting when the marsh wars will end.

Still, an executive with the Koll Real Estate Group is confident enough of the development’s success that she threw a celebratory party last week in Newport Beach for about 150 supporters. Senior Vice President Lucy Dunn called the party a gesture of appreciation to proponents who weathered the 12-hour commission hearing. She is upbeat about the project’s future and emphasized that the new development will balance economic and environmental concerns.

“There’s no question everyone wants the wetlands restored. That’s the goal,” Dunn said Thursday.

The Koll plan calls for building 900 homes in the wetlands area--the aspect of the project stirring the most vehement protest--and another 2,400 homes on a nearby mesa. In exchange for the wetlands development, Koll has assembled a $48-million plan to restore the remaining wetlands.

Grading on the mesa could begin in late summer 1997, along with initial wetlands restoration work, Dunn said.

Project opponents, dubious about the Koll restoration plan, say they will press on.

“We plan on pursuing every legal and administrative remedy available to us,” said Marcia Hanscom, who is working on Bolsa Chica for the Sierra Club. “People are saying, this is enough in Southern California. We don’t need to pave over every last piece of earth.”

The County Board of Supervisors approved the plan in late 1994, and the state Coastal Commission followed suit last month with an 8-3 vote that heartened proponents and angered environmentalists. Several more hurdles lay ahead:

* Opponents of the project filed two lawsuits against Orange County after the supervisors’ vote, claiming the county’s environmental impact report failed to address the effects of the housing project. The two suits were to be heard today in Superior Court in Santa Ana, but in a last-minute turn of events so characteristic of Bolsa Chica’s history, the hearing was delayed.

One suit--brought by the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, city of Seal Beach, Gabrielino Shoshone Nation, Huntington Beach Tomorrow and the Sierra Club--is now scheduled to be heard next Friday. The hearing date for the second suit, brought by Huntington Beach Union High School and Huntington Beach City School districts, was not available Thursday.

* Several environmental groups, including the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, say they plan to mount a legal challenge contending coastal commissioners failed to protect wetlands. A Huntington Beach City Council subcommittee met in closed session Thursday to discuss suing the commission but did not reach a decision. “We intend to further study our options,” Mayor David Sullivan said.

* A federal proposal to purchase the wetlands was stymied in December amid questions about whether years of oil-field operations had contaminated the wetlands. But the notion of a public purchase was rejuvenated last week with news of a pending federal-state study of reported contaminants and signs that the state may play a larger role in discussions.

* Under the federal Clean Water Act, the project must be reviewed by the Army Corps of Engineers, which hopes to finish a draft environmental impact report in six to eight weeks. A decision from the corps, expected in late 1996, is considered the last major hurdle for the project.

One potential wrinkle is that the Environmental Protection Agency, which has expressed strong reservations about the Koll project, has the power to veto a corps decision--an ability that recently has come under attack amid budget sparring on Capitol Hill.

Such a veto is used only rarely, less than 20 times nationally since 1977, said Tom Yocom, national wetlands expert at EPA regional offices in San Francisco. Still, the environmental agency has said “on numerous occasions” that it considers the proposed plan to build houses on wetlands at Bolsa Chica to be a candidate for a veto if the corps moved forward to issue a permit over EPA’s objections, Yocom said.

“We’re looking environmentally for the best thing that can be done for Bolsa Chica,” he added.

At Koll, Dunn said the federal agency must have very specific reasons to issue a veto, and her company hopes to design a project that does not prompt such a challenge.

Both options on the horizon today for Bolsa Chica--the Koll plan and a possible public purchase--involve wetlands restoration, Dunn said. If the public purchase falters, she said, “we believe that EPA will still want to meet the goal” of restoration and will still allow a project permit.

“You always have to look at this as, what is the goal? The goal is the restoration of the wetlands,” Dunn said. “That has to be the litmus test. How are we going to restore these wetlands?”

Times correspondent Debra Cano contributed to this story.