The Wetlands Development Deal

Re Bolsa Chica Wetlands restoration “deal”: Ralph Bauer, who criticized The Times’ Nov. 11 editorial (“A Deal’s a Deal in Bolsa Chica”) is a longtime Huntington Beach activist, respected opinion leader and active member of one of the state’s toughest and most effective environmental groups, the Amigos de Bolsa Chica (Letters, “No Wetlands Deal Until People Speak,” Nov. 17).

Anyone with any sense of the history of the planning efforts for development of the privately owned Bolsa Chica area during the 1970s and ‘80s knows that the Amigos brought well-informed, well-publicized and steadfast opposition to each land-use plan for Bolsa Chica over a period of two decades--until 1989.

In that year, the Amigos board of directors unanimously endorsed a development plan that eliminated the most objectionable feature of prior plans--the navigable channel and marina--and expanded required wetlands restoration to 1,100 acres. In exchange, the property owner was and is to be supported in its efforts to build up to 5,700 homes (the Koll Co. has proposed 4,884 homes) to finance the cost of removal and consolidation of dozens of oil wells and gas lines in the lowlands and to provide for the multimillion-dollar cost of restoring the degraded wetlands in the area.

Bauer is correct that the 500 non-wetlands acres designated by the coalition for development must be subject to traffic and infrastructure capacity studies (and I would add, comply with the city and county’s new Growth and Congestion Management Plans).

However, “consent of the governed” was not only provided by city and county officials representing their electors on the coalition, it was given by the highly informed Amigos, who represent environmentalists such as Bauer.

JOHN ERSKINE, Former mayor, Huntington Beach