Huntington Beach to lift COVID-19 local emergency

The city of Huntington Beach will be ending its COVID-19 local emergency, after the Huntington Beach City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to direct city staff to prepare the necessary paperwork.

Huntington Beach will join neighboring Newport Beach, which voted to lift its local emergency on June 22.

In Surf City, the local emergency has been in place since March 16, 2020 at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic. The California economy was largely fully reopened on June 15 by Gov. Gavin Newsom and Huntington Beach is coming off a Fourth of July weekend that saw thousands flock to Pier Plaza for a festival and fireworks show on Sunday night.

“We had a huge crowd here, and Independence Day is really our official kickoff of the summer tourist season,” said Councilman Mike Posey, who proposed the agenda item. “We have the U.S. Open [of Surfing] coming to Huntington Beach…and of course the airshow with concerts in October. So what better way to announce to the world that Huntington Beach is open for business? We’re eager to fill our hotels, we’re eager to fill our restaurants.”

Data provided by the Orange County Health Care Agency show that about half of Huntington Beach residents under the age of 65 have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Among people 65 and older, that figure jumps to more than 80%.

While supporting the lifting of the local emergency, Councilwoman Natalie Moser reiterated she believes it is imperative for people to continue to get vaccinated. The Delta variant of the virus has been spreading nationwide.

“We don’t want this [COVID-19] variant to continue to change and create another one and another one,” Moser said. “We want to continue with this recovery.”

Huntington Beach to begin developing sustainability master plan

In other council action, the panel voted 5-1 on an agenda item proposed by Moser calling for the development of a sustainability master plan. The lone dissenting vote came from Councilman Erik Peterson, who said he hadn’t seen a sustainability plan that didn’t urbanize a community or make construction cost more.

The master plan would address four core sustainability elements: protection of the local environment, advancement of common economic interests, expansion of community health and well-being programs and elevation of equity and inclusion efforts.

“All of us cannot go a day without seeing on the news about fires, excessive heat variations…and we also see things here more locally,” Moser said. “I went on our website and it was challenging to find all of the things that we’re doing in one location, because they’re in many locations [on the site].”

Moser said the city is already doing many environmentally friendly things, including solar power projects, installing LED streetlights and encouraging development of electric vehicle charging stations. However, they are all disconnected and disparate.

“I think that the value of creating a sustainable master plan is to be able to join all of these things into one holistic and whole-system approach,” she said. “We all know that what gets measured, gets done. It’s important that we can bring the entire community along, have all of these things in one document, have the measurements there.”

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