Friends or Foes? : Environment: Critics say the Amigos de Bolsa Chica has sold out. But group defends support of plans for a 3,300-home tract in a sensitive coastal area.

HUNTINGTON BEACH —  Spurred by a League of Women Voters study purporting to show the detrimental impact of a marina proposed for the Bolsa Chica wetlands, eight concerned citizens gathered at Herb Chatterton’s house here one evening in 1976.

“We thought of it as a local issue,” said Chatterton, now a Sony Corp. executive living in Irvine. “None of us had any track records as environmentalists at that point. So we just organized a group, picked a name for it and we were off and running.”

The name was Amigos de Bolsa Chica, and the group’s purpose was to work for the preservation and restoration of California’s largest unprotected stretch of coastal wetlands south of San Francisco.

“It was just a hobby, not a career,” Chatterton said.

But in the 19 years since its formation, Amigos de Bolsa Chica has evolved from what might have been described as a bunch of citizen activists into a powerful environmental group near the center of decision-making in Huntington Beach.

“The Amigos are a major player,” said Huntington Beach Mayor Victor Leipzig, a former Amigos president. “It’s about as successful an environmental organization as you can find.”

In the process, however, the group has also attracted a host of critics. Although supporters say that working closely with developers and government officials has allowed the Amigos to exercise an effective form of environmental politics, detractors charge the group with selling out its environmental agenda by cozying up to the opposition.

“The Amigos are now an anti-environmental group,” said Gordon LaBedz, a spokesman for the Surfrider Foundation, which opposes all development at Bolsa Chica.

Bob Winchell, a lifetime Amigos member and longtime Huntington Beach resident, said: “I’m pretty well disenchanted with the group. They don’t represent the citizens they used to represent.”

Six of the seven current members of the Huntington Beach City Council are among the Amigos’ 1,700 members. Leipzig and two other council members are former Amigos presidents.

Three of the city’s six planning commissioners, two executives of the Koll Real Estate Group--which has received approval from the Orange County Board of Supervisors to build a housing project on the wetlands--and former County Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder are also members.

All three City Council candidates endorsed by the organization won their seats in the city’s recent election.

And the Board of Supervisors’ unanimous approval in December of the Koll group’s plan to build 3,300 homes in and around the wetlands was credited in large measure to years of behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Amigos, who tacitly supported the final plan as being consistent with their twin goals of minimum housing density and maximum wetlands restoration.

“The Amigos run the city now,” Flossie Horgan, a founding member of the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, which opposes the plan, said after the supervisors took their vote.

Activists on both sides say the turning point in the group’s approach to the Bolsa Chica development came in 1989. Until then, they agree, Amigos de Bolsa Chica was generally acknowledged as the voice of the environmental community on all matters pertaining to the 1,700-acre Bolsa Chica site.

Since 1972, the landowner had been planning a massive development for the area that was to include 5,700 homes, a 1,300-slip marina, two 2,000-foot jetties and an array of oceanfront hotels, shops and restaurants.

After the project won approval from the supervisors in 1985, however, it became bogged down in legal and political challenges, most notably from the Amigos.

Finally, in an attempt to break the logjam, then-Supervisor Wieder and then-Huntington Beach Mayor John Erskine formed a group that included representatives from the developer, the state, the city, the county and the Amigos.

Meeting regularly from November, 1988, until May, 1989, the group developed an agreement that eliminated the proposed marina, hotels and restaurants, significantly reduced the number of houses and sharply increased the number of wetland acres the developer would restore.

It was from that 1989 agreement, called the Bolsa Chica Planning Coalition Concept Plan, that the current proposal evolved. It calls for the Koll group to spend $48 million to restore 950 acres of degraded wetlands in exchange for the right to build 3,300 homes--including about 900 in the federally designated marshlands.

“We spent hundreds of hours listening, learning and arguing,” said Lucy Dunn, senior vice president of the Koll group. Immediately upon concluding, she said, she became an Amigos member.

Adrianne Morrison, the Amigos’ executive director, praised the development plan that ultimately resulted from the talks. “The balance has tipped to where the environment is the key part and the housing is only a small element,” she said.

Not all environmentalists agreed. In 1992, opposed to what they saw as the Amigos’ capitulation to developers’ interests, some members of the group and others formed the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, which favors complete preservation of the wetlands as open space and has, with various other groups, been at odds with the Amigos ever since.

Recently LaBedz asked the Campaign to Save California Wetlands, a statewide coalition of environmental groups, to remove the Amigos from membership on the grounds that the group “has been taken over by the wetlands developer.”

A spokeswoman for the campaign said no decision had yet been made on how to respond.

At the Amigos’ annual meeting last month, a group of disgruntled members attempted unsuccessfully to unseat and replace the organization’s leadership. And three weeks, ago a coalition of groups filed a lawsuit citing environmental and economic grounds in challenging the project that the Amigos, the county and the developer have so painstakingly attempted to mold.

“Accepting 3,300 homes at Bolsa Chica is not a position congruent with an environmental viewpoint,” said Connie Boardman, president of the Land Trust.

Amigos leaders make no bones about their friendly relations with county officials and the Koll group.

“We’ve become very skilled at working within the process,” said Chuck Nelson, the organization’s president. “We have built a reputation in local, state and federal governments.”

Every year, Morrison said, the Koll group contributes $1,000 to help sponsor the Amigos’ annual 10-K run, its major fund-raiser. Last year, when the organization’s offices were ransacked, Koll donated furniture to the organization. And about twice a month, Morrison said, Amigos leaders meet with Koll executives to discuss various topics of mutual concern.

All of which sounds highly suspicious to LaBedz.

“My take is that they’re not the same group that they were in the 1970s,” he said of the Amigos. “It’s a Koll-dominated organization now. I consider Amigos de Bolsa Chica as much my enemy as I do the Koll Real Estate Group.”

Times correspondent Debra Cano contributed to this report.