City makes deal to snap up Bolsa

Under plan, Huntington would annex each new home on mesa as it is completed; council will take up issue Dec. 12.Huntington Beach is close to reaching a deal on Bolsa Chica annexation that would individually incorporate homes into the city as the construction on each luxury-unit is completed, city officials said.

Most of the deal won’t be made public for several days, said Paul Emery, deputy city administrator, adding that the City Council will take up the issue at a special meeting on Dec. 12.

What is known is that developer Hearthside Homes will be allowed to tap into the city’s water supply, eliminating a proposal to extend a water line from Cypress Avenue along Bolsa Chica Street, a project that would have torn up city roads for months.

While Huntington Beach now gets to dodge the traffic headaches, the developer also gets to avoid the construction costs of the water pipeline. Hearthside Homes Vice President Ed Mountford has said the pipeline would cost about $8 million.

City Council members including Debbie Cook said Mountford is likely low-balling the cost of the eight-mile pipeline, which would also require a 1.2-million gallon reservoir. A pipeline project of that magnitude would cost at least twice what Mountford is suggesting, Cook argued at a September council meeting.

A large portion of that money should go to the city, said Councilman Keith Bohr. The proposal Hearthside is putting forward doesn’t include enough park space as prescribed by the city’s zoning law, and the money saved from the pipeline project should go into the city’s park fund to build more public spaces, he said.

“If they don’t build the waterline, then we should get the money for the parks,” he said.

Emery said the city had negotiated the park fees but had yet to finalize the deal and wouldn’t be publicly releasing it for several more days.

“We have the language worked out, we just need to plug the numbers in,” he said.

The other major component of the deal is that the homes won’t be annexed into the city until after they’ve been built, Emery said. The building permits were already issued by the Orange County building department, and Hearthside officials said they did not want to have to go through the planning process again.

Bohr said he wasn’t concerned about allowing Hearthside to use county laws; besides differences in street widths and housing setbacks, most of the county and city building codes are the same.

Bohr first brought the proposal forward in May, arguing that since the homes were going to be built on the Bolsa Chica, the city might as well annex the county island where they sit and collect the building and development fees.

For decades environmentalists and developers fought over the fate of the land, and in March the California Coastal Commission finally approved a scaled-down 384-unit luxury development on the upper portion of the Bolsa Chica mesa with dozens of conditions of approval.

In exchange, Mountford said he would agree to sell 103 acres of wetland to the state Wildlife Conservation Board for $65 million, but not until the Coastal Commission actually issued him his development permits. To speed up the process, Hearthside paid for an additional Coastal Commission staff member to finish the entitlements.

QUESTION

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