Approval for Hellman Doesn’t End Fight

When a state panel last week narrowly blessed a project that would fill a piece of Seal Beach coastal wetlands for an 18-hole golf course, one onlooker remarked that the Eureka meeting room was so thick with lawyers that it felt like a courtroom.

Not surprisingly, one of those lawyers spent most of a United Airlines flight home to Southern California poring over a copy of the California Coastal Act, which governs development along the state’s 1,100-mile coastline.

The players remain braced for battle even after the state Coastal Commission’s 6-5 vote for homes, a golf course and restored wetlands near the San Gabriel River. Some foresee a tortured, divisive road ahead--court challenges from environmentalists, mounting legal costs and political wrangling. And the stakes extend far beyond the Hellman Ranch development in Seal Beach.

With as much as 90% of the region’s wetlands already lost to development, the project starkly dramatizes how the struggle to save the remainder is one of the most divisive environmental problems that state officials face.

Some developers maintain that wetlands restoration linked to building on wetlands, such as the Hellman project, is sometimes the only practical and economic way to assure degraded wetlands are saved and improved. Restoration can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre, sometimes with limited success, and this project would use private instead of public funds.

But environmentalists argue that the Hellman model of allowing a piece of wetlands to be destroyed so the remainder can be saved is both reckless and illegal under the Coastal Act--which the commission’s own staff says does not allow the filling of wetlands. Critics contend that by approving the fill of 17.9 acres of wetlands at Hellman, commissioners may trigger a domino effect that puts other wetlands at risk.

“We’re destroying the village in order to save it, to paraphrase another era,” said Melvin L. Nutter, chairman of the League for Coastal Protection, an environmental group, and a former Coastal Commission chairman. His group is considering suing in an effort to overturn the vote, which “seems to me to sort of break loose the constraints of standards,” he said.

The commission has struggled for years deciphering what projects can truly be called restoration, Nutter said. “Traditionally, the commission has taken the position that unless a project is truly there for the purpose of restoration, then it’s something else.”

But the developer, Hellman Properties LLC, counters that its wetlands are degraded and need the restoration proposed as part of the project, which includes 70 luxury homes, the golf course, open space and 39 acres of created or restored wetlands.

Specifically, the developer plans to fill 17.9 acres of the 27-acre wetlands on the site, restore the nine remaining acres and create another 30 acres of wetlands.

Fully 90% of the wetlands site is devoid of vegetation, and it sits almost a mile from the ocean, Hellman officials wrote the commission.

“There are no natural values left on this site,” Hellman spokesman Dave Bartlett said. “At one point in time, I’m sure it was extremely beautiful. Unfortunately, at this point, what we’re left with is 27 acres of severely degraded wetlands.”

But commission staff say they know of no other instance in which the panel has approved the fill of wetlands for a golf course.

In fact, the commission’s longtime executive director, Peter Douglas, warned before the vote that it could set a precedent for future commission actions.

Project supporters reject that contention.

“It seems like precedent is in the eye of the beholder,” said land-use attorney Steven Kaufmann, who represents the city of Seal Beach, a staunch advocate of the project. He called the Hellman Ranch wetlands unique, in part because of their degraded status, adding: “Whenever any other wetlands come up, this is not going to be cited as a precedent.”

Commission Chairman Rusty Areias, a former assemblyman who cast the deciding vote, also discounts claims that the decision has imperiled other coastal wetlands. Still, he said, he agonized over what stance to take.

“It’s the toughest vote I’ve had to make on the commission,” Areias said.

But Vice Chairwoman Sara Wan, who cast a “no” vote, says the decision is precedent-setting, carving a path that other commissions--and developers--can follow.

“If this decision stands, it will set precedent for fill of wetlands throughout the coastal zone,” Wan said.

“You create a loophole that you can drive a golf course through. That’s what they did. You have shown developers how they can get around [the Coastal Act].”

The commission’s own staff wrote in its report to commissioners that it “sees no legal basis under the Coastal Act for approval of a project that allows the fill of 17.9 acres of wetlands for development of a golf course.”

The commission did not specify exactly what legal grounds it used to approve Hellman, but it is expected to rely on two possible legal reasons already studied and rejected by the staff:

* Restoration: The Coastal Act allows filling of wetlands for eight reasons, including restoration. Hellman officials argued that golf course revenue is needed to finance wetlands restoration. But the staff concluded the homes actually would fund the work, and that the golf course therefore could not be considered a bona fide restoration project.

* Boating facilities: In some cases, boating facilities can be built in wetlands labeled “degraded” by the state. The staff determined the Hellman golf course did not meet the test of this category.

Now, outraged environmentalists accuse the commission of violating the same Coastal Act it is supposed to uphold.

“We are going to be seriously considering litigation,” said Marcia Hanscom, who chairs the Sierra Club California wetlands committee. “This is horrible precedent.”

Over and over, critics recall the infamous and hard-fought 1996 commission vote allowing 200 homes on the Bolsa Chica wetlands near Huntington Beach--a vote struck down by a San Diego Superior Court judge in a case due to be argued on appeal in October.

“What the commission has done is walk us back into Bolsa Chica II, another court fight over wetlands, when the court just gave us a clear decision,” said Susan Jordan of the League for Coastal Protection, an environmental group.

But Hellman officials and supportive commissioners see it as vastly different from Bolsa Chica, both because of the wetlands’ degraded nature and because, they say, the Seal Beach community so strongly backs the Hellman project.

Four out of the city’s five council members flew to Eureka to support the project, and city officials rejoiced in the Eureka Inn lobby after the vote.

Such fervent local support appears to have been a significant factor in swaying the commission.

“The Coastal Act was passed by people in communities like Seal Beach,” Areias said. “This community spent 30 years and many elections and many political careers that went by the wayside trying to arrive at a community consensus for that project.”

If his panel turned down that project, he added, “How do you look a whole community in the eye that was, from what I can tell, 99% consensus?”

Commissioners supporting the project also were troubled by what would happen to the wetlands if the golf course and the related wetlands restoration were struck down.

The Port of Long Beach studied the site this summer as a possible wetlands restoration that it might fund to compensate for deep-water marine habitat that would be destroyed in expanding the port into the Pacific. Such trade-offs are common funding sources for wetlands restoration projects such as that underway at Bolsa Chica. The state purchased most of those wetlands last year from a developer.

The port considered restoring about 70 acres of wetlands on Hellman land, or nearly twice what the developer is planning, but concluded that the cost would be prohibitive unless certain conditions were met, such as the landowner dedicating the land for restoration.

“We would always be interested in the possibility of doing a wetlands restoration for wetlands mitigation,” Long Beach port environmental specialist Thomas Johnson said Friday. But he said the port’s conditions still stand. “It doesn’t make any economic sense under the way it’s set up now.”