In the Hills Above Brea, a Battle Is Rejoined

The hills above Brea where Nuevo Energy Corp. wants to plant 914 houses hardly seem like a luxury destination. There is seeping tar, leaking methane gas, an earthquake fault and soil tainted with hazardous chemicals--not to mention hundreds of oil wells churning around the clock, a gas plant, ubiquitous pipelines and two tank farms processing crude.

But convincing prospective buyers that the place can be cleaned up for houses is not Nuevo’s biggest hurdle. Oil companies have done that many times before.

No, the hard sell will be their neighbors.

Nuevo and other oil giants are looking to build thousands of homes on northern Orange County and southern Los Angeles County oil fields that will eventually dry up. They’re trying hard to assure nearby residents that flattening and building on the hills won’t drastically alter their communities. Aera Energy LLCwants to build 3,600 homes, mostly in L.A. County.

In Orange County, Nuevo is girding for a particularly rough battle. It had already angered preservationists by spending $205,000 against a November 2000 ballot measure that would have required Brea voters’ approval for most hillside developments.

Then, on the eve of the failed referendum, the company withdrew its development plan from the city. It later submitted its proposal to the county instead.

A company representative said Nuevo opted to file its development plans with the county because it was the “more appropriate” agency, given that the land is in an unincorporated area. Now Brea has no power over what gets built on land that will ultimately be part of the city, leaving some locals blaming the initiative.

“I think maybe we hurt ourselves,” said City Councilman Roy Moore.

The city has tried to wield some influence by submitting its own proposal for the property to the county. It included a couple of key requests: that the project not disturb a ridgeline that locals are particularly fond of, and that it not include a road that could interfere with a vital wildlife link stretching from the Cleveland National Forest to Whittier.

Those suggestions were largely dismissed in the project’s environmental impact report, submitted late last month; it was written by an independent consultant but reflects substantial input from Nuevo.

“We spent a lot of money to do this, and it appears to have fallen on deaf ears,” said Moore, who helped draft the Brea proposal. “We may be getting development that is wrong for our community.”

The environmental report said the city’s proposal would conflict with oil and gas production, put homes too close to tar seeps and require so much additional dirt to be moved that the cost for that alone would sink the project.

Nuevo officials defend their own plan as a model of environmental sensitivity. They say the ridgeline the city wants saved is actually not a ridgeline but merely a hilltop with limited aesthetic value. The controversial road the company hopes to build, they said, will be specially designed to increase the mobility of animals through the area.

“It’s a conservation-minded plan,” said Bob Odle, a real estate consultant for Nuevo. “It provides for 65% of the land to remain as open space.”

It’s open space that doubles as an active oil field.

Under its plan, the company will continue oil production on the 514 acres to be preserved as open space. There are 292 working oil wells on that land, Odle said, and they will continue to pump for 30 to 40 years.

Environmentalists say that definition of open space is outlandish.

“This is a new one to me, calling active oil wells open space,” said Claire Schlotterbeck, a founder of the Brea-based conservation group Hills for Everyone. She says the project would be disastrous for endangered gnatcatchers and other wildlife, despite company assurances to the contrary.

“The problem is this company’s arrogance,” she said. “They took an end-run around the city to file their project with a county government that has never seen a development proposal it doesn’t like.”

County officials say it is too early in the process to comment. Hearings on the project will be held in mid-June. The environmental report that was filed is only a starting point, they say, and they need time to evaluate its merits.

Some in Brea, meanwhile, remain conflicted about the lasting effects of the hillside initiative of 2000. “These were good-intentioned people who got people’s minds focused on our hillsides,” Moore said of activists who drafted the ballot measure. “But sometimes things go awry.”