Swapping oil for homes

Dave Brooks

Landowners are hoping to convert an oil tank field linked to a

devastating 1990 oil spill into a multi-family neighborhood of

duplexes and triplexes.

The proposal could end years of debate about the site, once home

to six 55,000-barrel oil storage tanks that area residents called

unsightly and fought successfully to have dismantled. For six years

the storage units sat dormant, mothballed nearly a half-decade after

an oil tanker using the field’s offshore buoy ran over its own anchor

and spewed 416,000 gallons of crude oil onto 15 miles of county

beaches. Televangelist Pat Robertson later tried to revive the site

for oil delivery, but was rebuffed after an outcry from area

residents and a threatened legal battle with City Hall.

The Mills Land and Water Company currently owns the 25-acre lot

that runs along Newland Street just south of Lomond Drive and north

of Hamilton Avenue. Company officials hope to build a gated community

of 81 duplex units and 123 triplex units on the site, along with a

two-acre public park for the surrounding community. Builders JCC

Homes and John Laing Homes have formed a partnership venture called

WL Direct Huntington Beach to tackle the project. The group recently

agreed to reimburse Huntington Beach $273,793 for an environmental

impact report on the development.

John Laing Homes will build the triplexes for the project, which

range from 1,383 to 1,888 square feet, while JCC Homes constructs the

specially designed duplexes, ranging from 3,275 to 4,030 square feet,

WL Direct official Debra Pember said.

The duplexes will be attached at the kitchen to meet the requests

of city officials, Pember said.

“The city was really insisting on an attached product,” she said.

“They were looking for a higher density.”

Besides the permitting process, planners will have to get the

property rezoned from industrial to residential before houses can be

built. Nearby resident Dave Guido, an avid opponent of the former oil

field, said he welcomes the change.

“We knew something was going to be built there, but what we wanted

to be sure didn’t get built was some industrial park,” he said. “We

wanted something that would add to our neighborhood.”

For years Guido and his Huntington Beach Coastal Community Assn.

fought a variety of proposals for the project, including the proposal

by Robertson to renew oil delivery at the site.

About eight years after the 1990 oil spill, Robertson reopened a

defunct Powerine Oil Refinery in Santa Fe Springs with the hopes of

pumping crude from tankers off the coast of Huntington Beach through

a pipeline to the refinery. The crude oil would be temporarily stored

at the Newland Street oil yard.

Huntington Beach officials strongly opposed the plan and the City

Council filed a formal opposition letter to the project with the

South Coast Air Quality Management District. Then in September 1998,

the council voted to sue Robertson’s company CENCO if it didn’t drop

the plan. Company officials killed the proposal two weeks later.

Robertson eventually spent $1 million to have the tanks dismantled.

“That lot was the reason I got involved in all this stuff,” said

Guido, who was fairly inactive in city politics until the CENCO

debate. Today Guido is president of Huntington Beach Tomorrow, a

powerful political advocacy group founded by Assemblyman Tom Harman

that advocates for smart growth and fiscal responsibility.

Pember said her company is doing its best to work with community

leaders and deal with concerns before they blow up into political

controversies.

“This project is really all about the community, because it

affects everyone,” she said.