2 Suits Challenge Using Wetlands for Golf Course

In what conservationists say is a crucial battle to protect California’s fast-disappearing coastal wetlands, three groups on Monday filed two separate lawsuits challenging the state Coastal Commission’s vote allowing 18 acres of Seal Beach wetlands to be filled to build a golf course.

The two suits attempt to overturn the panel’s hotly contested approval of 70 luxury homes, restored wetlands and an 18-hole golf course on the Hellman Ranch property. They allege that by allowing the golf course, commissioners violated the state Coastal Act and its wetlands protections.

In a 6-5 vote, commissioners in September approved a gated community, as well as the golf course and 39 acres of restored wetlands, on a 196-acre site near the San Gabriel River. The project passed even though the commission’s own staff concluded that filling wetlands for a golf course was not allowed by the Coastal Act.

Several attorneys said Monday’s lawsuits could have implications far beyond Orange County by making the courts decide how much the state act protects coastal wetlands.

“In terms of a wider regional and statewide significance, the primary issue in the litigation is whether [a golf course] is an allowable use,” said the commission’s chief counsel, Ralph Faust.

The twin suits are an effort to ward off the loss of more marshland in a region that already has lost 90% or more of its coastal wetlands, said leaders of the groups going to court.

“For environmental groups that are strapped for funds, this is hard, and we shouldn’t have to do it, but we have to because it’s important,” said Susan Jordan, a spokeswoman for the League for Coastal Protection, one group bringing suit.

A principal with developer Hellman Properties LLC said he disagrees that the Hellman Ranch vote automatically sets a precedent for other wetlands.

“We’re disappointed,” said the official, Jerry Tone. “We’ve worked very hard to make this a model project, and despite the lawsuits, we feel the Coastal Commission was well within the tenets of the Coastal Act to do what they did.”

He said he regrets that environmentalists chose to sue.

“I’d hoped we’d have a conversation about our differing opinions in person instead of in the courts,” he said. “This thing didn’t need to go to the courts.”

Hellman Properties will move ahead with planning the development, Tone said. “This doesn’t mean the project is dead by any means.”

The flurry of legal filings came on the last day that the commission’s Sept. 9 vote could be challenged in court.

Seal Beach officials supported the Hellman Ranch project, saying it was dramatically better than earlier plans for the site. But environmentalists fiercely opposed it, arguing that the 39 acres of wetlands to be created or restored by the developer did not justify the loss of nearly 18 acres of natural wetlands.

“It sets a precedent for the development of other wetlands in California,” said Laurens Silver, an attorney with the California Environmental Law Project in the Bay Area. Silver represents the League for Coastal Protection, a coastal watchdog group that has joined forces with California Earth Corps in a suit filed Monday in Orange County Superior Court.

A third environmental group, the Wetlands Action Network, filed a lawsuit Monday in San Francisco Superior Court.

“There is a shortage of wetlands, not a shortage of golf courses, in this state,” network director Marcia Hanscom said in a written statement.

Injunction Sought Against Project

Both lawsuits argue that putting a golf course atop wetlands is not allowed under the 1972 Coastal Act, which governs development along the state’s 1,100-mile coast. The act prohibits the diking, filling or dredging of wetlands except for eight uses, and the environmentalists argue that a golf course is not a permitted use.

The two suits urge the court to overturn the Hellman Ranch approval on the grounds that it violates the act. The Wetlands Action Network seeks a preliminary injunction halting work on the project “unless and until a valid permit has been issued by the commission.”

Legal challenges to commission permit approvals must be filed within 60 days, even though the so-called findings--the commission staff’s legal defense of such approvals--are generally not completed for several months. The Hellman Ranch findings, for instance, are still being written.

At Hellman Properties, Tone said he believes those findings can prevent the Hellman Ranch vote from setting a statewide precedent.

“We feel we can control the precedent-setting nature through a set of very carefully written findings,” he said, “and we have the commitment of staff to produce such findings.”