Laguna Discusses Slide Recovery

Laguna Beach city officials Monday considered more than a dozen proposals for financing reconstruction of the Bluebird Canyon slope where a June 1 landslide destroyed or damaged 20 homes and continues threatening more.

Among the revenue-raising proposals aired during the special City Council session were a parcel tax, bond sale and increased sales tax.

“We have to start thinking creatively,” Mayor Elizabeth Pearson-Schneider told fellow council members.

Although city officials last week managed to free up $1 million for emergency repairs to the collapsed hillside, most believe it will cost about three times that much just to shore up the area in time for next winter’s rains.

“That’s a drop in the bucket,” City Manager Kenneth C. Frank said of the $1 million. “That won’t get us to Nov. 1 ... let alone any permanent restoration of streets, which will be very expensive.”

Nearly every revenue-raising measure under consideration would have to be approved by voters in a special election probably to be held in November.

One way of avoiding such an election, Frank said, would be to gut the city’s capital improvement budget for the next three or four years, but that would mean forgoing street maintenance, storm drain repairs and public access repairs citywide.

Though the city has not yet heard from U.S. officials, Frank said, he remains confident that the federal government will pick up a large chunk of the tab for repairing such public infrastructure as roads, sewers, storm drains and water lines.

But permanently rebuilding the hillside under that infrastructure -- with a price tag that could reach $10 million -- is a burden the city must bear.

One resident, Mary Fegraus, suggested setting up a permanent disaster relief fund. “We need to be thinking about taking care of ourselves,” she said. Such disasters are “something Laguna has to face forever.”

City staffers will continue working with engineers hired to stabilize the sagging slopes by winter and pollsters hired to gauge public sentiment on ways to finance recovery.

The goal, said Todd MacCallum, whose home was damaged in the slide and who speaks for the Bluebird Canyon Community Assn. in representing slide victims, is that “whatever happens ... nobody should go through this uncertainty again.”