Lido Isle plans called elitist

Paul Clinton

LIDO ISLE -- The California Coastal Commission has rejected a plan by

the Via Lido Community Assn. to spruce up the island’s entrance.

The commission unanimously turned down the plan at its meeting this

week, with at least one commissioner saying the project would have a

“chilling effect” on public access to the island’s beaches.

“The commissioners expressed concern that it would discourage access,”

coastal program analyst Anne Kramer said. “That it would give the

impression that the island was private.”

The association had backed the project, estimated to cost between

$450,000 and $600,000, despite a vocal contingent of Lido residents who

were against it. Funding would have come from member dues -- about $500

annually for the homeowners.

Association president Hugh Helm bristled at the suggestion that the

community homeowner’s group hoped to turn the island into an exclusive

enclave.

“It was an entry beautification project,” Helm said. “Nothing could be

further from the truth.”

The project would have altered the traffic patterns at Via Antibes and

Via Lido Soud, at Lido Bridge. The association had hoped to install a

traffic circle, new street median, half-block park and other landscape

improvements.

But residents fighting the project accused Helm of planning a project

that would have narrowed the opening into the island.

“It was to keep ‘other’ people off the island,” said Judy Rosener, a

Lido resident and herself a former coastal commissioner. “It’s snobbery.”

The project’s denial was not the only bad news to come out of the

meeting for the association. In additionto shooting down the project, the

coastal commission instructed agency staffers to begin an investigation

into a series of signs on the island that read “Residents Only.”

Those signs were visible in several slide-show photos of the entryway,

Kramer said.

The Newport Beach planning department had granted a preliminary

approval for the project. Planners even issued Helm an “approval in

concept,” City Traffic Engineer Rich Edmonston said.

Edmonston disagreed with residents who say the project would have kept

the public off Lido.

“I didn’t see anything negative about what they were proposing,”

Edmonston said. “[The island] isn’t terribly inviting to the public to

begin with. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of public that goes there.”

In the mid-1990s, a group of Lido residents put together plans for a

guardhouse at the island entrance, a plan city officials discouraged

before it faced any approval.