Losers in the Bolsa Chica Giveaway

It’s being hailed as one of the great win-win deals, satisfactory to environmentalists, state politicians and regulators, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and even the oil companies. Bolsa Chica, nearly a thousand acres of prized wetland in Huntington Beach, and under threat from the Koll Real Estate Group, is now officially saved.

The state of California will pay the Koll group $25 million for 880 acres, which will be restored to pristine wetland condition at an estimated cost of $79 million. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will pony up this sum in return for “mitigation credits,” which in plainer language mean rape-and-destroy licenses to wipe out hundreds of acres of other wetlands as they expand their port operations.

The politicians bask in voter approval as they do Mother Nature a good turn. And the developers and the oil companies that preceded them . . . well, aside from more of the good feelings being showered on this pact like rose petals at a summer wedding, what exactly do they get?

The Koll group gets $25 million for not building 900 houses on wetlands that federal law prohibits them from building on anyway. Multiply the numbers by the appropriate number of zeroes and it’s as though the traffic cop paid you handsomely for not parking in a tow-away zone.

In addition, the Koll group has been given the go-ahead by the state to build 2,400 houses on the adjacent mesa, which is one of the most significant archaeological sites in Southern California as well as habitat for the soon-to-be-extinct gnatcatcher and the beleaguered Pacific pocket mouse, whose present travails make Robert Burns’ “wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie” look like the happiest of campers.

To enumerate the windfall for the two oil companies--CalResources (a subsidiary of Shell) and Phillips Petroleum--some background is necessary.

Spread across the Bolsa Chica wetlands, which are separated from the Pacific by Highway 1 and a concrete culvert, are more than a hundred oil well pumps deployed over decades. Last year the Environmental Protection Agency disclosed the toxic legacy of this oil pumping: arsenic, mercury, cadmium and other poisons, which now saturate the wetlands and doubtless would have decreased the allure of any real estate development.

In the normal course of events the oil companies on Bolsa Chica would have been hit with federal and state lawsuits over this contamination. But instead of the hundreds of millions in fines and penalties normally levied in such cases, the two oil companies will now pay as little as $7 million for the cleanup and get to oversee it themselves. This is far preferable to having some pesky regulator demanding evidence that cleanup is actually taking place.

The EPA has been particularly exuberant over its supposed victory in getting hold of $400,000 of cleanup money paid by Exxon in the wake of the Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989, said sum to assist Shell and Phillips in their cleanup. “There’s no better use,” said the EPA’s regional director Hugh Barroll, “for the Exxon Valdez money.” Similarly awed by the miraculous turn of events was Mark Adelson of the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board, who said recently, “There’s a kind of poetic justice that damages collected as a result of an environmental catastrophe are going to create a success story.”

The cleanup in Alaska was under-funded, and the native fishing companies have been put out of business, yet here we have the EPA happy that it is able to reduce Shell and Phillips’ liabilities in Southern California by $400,000.

So much for winners. But this isn’t a regulatory fairy tale of the sort often touted by Babbitt and Gov. Pete Wilson, who has championed the Bolsa Chica deal as “a win-win agreement for the Southland.” There are losers, beyond the gnatcatcher, pocket mouse and other endangered species. Grass-roots green groups such as the Bolsa Chica Land Trust fought (and even now vow that the struggle is not over) for preservation and revival of the whole ecosystem, including the mesa. These organizers correctly argued from the start that Koll’s plans for the wetlands were illegal and that the port authorities’ money should have been used to buy the important upland habitat. And lost again are the concerns of the native Indians who will see a gated swatch of million-dollar homes dumped on their equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery.

George Bush popularized the notion of “no net loss of wetlands.” But it took Bill Clinton and Bruce Babbitt to carry the slogan into the real estate Hall of Fame as one of the greatest in the history of hype.