Newport council won’t block school parking lot construction at Ensign Intermediate School

Reluctantly, the Newport Beach City Council upheld a permit ultimately allowing Newport-Mesa Unified School District to remove several mature trees in front of Ensign Intermediate School.

Neighbors called the district’s plan to fell up to 15 half-century old trees, mostly rosewoods, to modify the Ensign parking lot and make way for security fencing “devastating.” Council members criticized the district’s communications prowess. But after stepping in Thursday to reconsider a permit issued by city staff, which allows the district to encroach on the city-controlled right of way before reaching school property, the council declined to revoke access.

The district started cutting down the trees this week.

Councilman Jeff Herdman said that however sympathetic council members were, they had to stick to a set of criteria for revoking the city permit, including whether the project would unreasonably impact safety, vehicular and pedestrian traffic, and the need for parking spaces.

A retired educator who once filled in as an assistant principal at Ensign, Herdman said he knew the campus grove to be a gathering place before and after school and an extension of the classroom during the day.

“I just think there have been so many public relations mistakes made throughout this entire process,” he said. “It could have been completely avoided.”

The tree removal will accommodate the installation of a security fence, part of a larger two-school, $5-million security project that will also add parking and change the drop-off lane at the middle school campus.

Bill Dunlap, a former city planning commissioner and nearby resident, accused school officials of disregarding a possible alternative negotiated with the city and rushing to chop down trees to beat an injunction set to be filed in Orange County Superior Court by the local environmentalist group Still Protecting Our Newport.

“That’s the deeper issue here, that we have a rogue school board that doesn’t even consider your opinions, let alone ours,” he said.

A judge ultimately granted a temporary restraining order Tuesday to pause tree removal, although most had been torn up by then. About 50 neighbors and activists spent hours outside the school Monday as district contractors with chainsaws chopped down the trees and Newport Beach police supervised the scene.

School district attorney Spencer Covert told the council the project is about safety.

“They have spent a lot of time on this project and have a lot of emotions involved in this project, but they are not a traffic engineer,” he said about neighbors and activists. “Who are the traffic engineers? They are on your staff, and it is your staff that has found that our project is safe.”

Outgoing NMUSD Superintendent Fred Navarro said that nine students were hit by cars — a hard tap or enough to be knocked over — in the problem zone on Irvine Avenue between Cliff Drive and Coral Place over the 2018-19 school year. Five were struck last school year before all campuses were closed in March because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Covert said the work needs to be done by the time staffers report to campus for the next school year on Aug. 19, pending the return of in-person instruction.

But neighbor Carol Dru said the city needed to suspend ingress and egress until “the community” better understands the project.

“I wake up in the morning and I can’t breathe. All those trees that used to produce oxygen and clean air are gone,” she said. “And then all those birds that loved the trees had to leave, but they left their nests with the baby birds or the eggs still in them. How sad.”

Nancy Barfield said she got 1,100 youngsters to sign a petition to preserve the trees.

“One of the students [passed] by when the trees were being torn down... and called me over and says, ‘I signed a petition, why are these trees being taken down? We want them for our school.’”

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