Environmental Study Supports Church’s Plans

A Quaker church’s proposal to build a sanctuary as big as the behemoth Crystal Cathedral on its Yorba Linda property will not significantly damage surrounding neighborhoods, according to a study released Wednesday.

The environmental impact study is expected to raise the heat on the long-simmering controversy over expansive plans by the Yorba Linda Friends Church.

The Quakers want to build a 70,000-square-foot, 2,862-seat facility with a six-acre parking lot and a building with classrooms and offices on land adjacent to their existing church on Laurel View Drive.

Residents fear the $15-million project could ruin one of the city’s rural neighborhoods by turning a meadow now used for horseback riding into a vast parking lot.

Leaders of the church--the fastest-growing Quaker congregation in the country--say they have no choice but to expand. The church’s existing sanctuary on 11 acres seats 750. Average weekend attendance has exploded from 256 in 1985 to more than 3,300 today.

The environmental report was prepared at the city’s behest by Templeton Planning Group of Newport Beach but was paid for by the church, as is typical of government-ordered studies.

The report gives the congregation reason to cheer. Of 21 potential environmental impacts studied by the consulting firm, only two were found to be unavoidable.

Those two are plans to demolish six houses for the parking lot and to construct the parking lot itself, which will replace a large, gently sloping pasture and mature trees and shrubs.

But the church owns the homes and the pasture, and the study determined that the church has the right to do as it pleases with them. The church has spent more than $4 million in the last four years to buy the homes.

“We’re very excited it’s out, and we’re on our way,” Friends Church Pastor Tom Babnick said of the report. “When you go through traffic and lighting and noise and pollution [with the consultants], and they say they can all be mitigated to a point of insignificance? Praise the Lord.”

But neighbors who live in a wooded glen of older homes and horse trails behind the church vow to continue to fight the plan.

“We would like for the semi-rural neighborhood that we enjoy to be preserved,” said Sue Fenwick, who lives on one of the jasmine- and eucalyptus-scented streets that wind up a state-owned mountain preserve beyond.

“We’re just trying to present options for the church as to other locations that would not disrupt the environment so drastically,” she said.

Fenwick would not comment on what proposals the residents have in mind.

The church had hoped to break ground on the project by 1999. But the release of the environmental impact report was delayed more than a year when the city selected a new consulting firm. Wednesday’s report was a draft. It will be amended in coming months to include reaction and concerns.

When the environmental review process is done, the plans are still subject to approval by the city Planning Commission and City Council.