Briefly in the news

A petition has been circulated in Huntington Harbour to fight the

suggestion of banning overnight stays and live-aboards in the harbor.

The Safe Boating Institute has collected 800 signatures this week with

hopes of discussing the matter with the Huntington Beach City Council in

a couple of weeks.

The group’s president Rod Wilson and City Councilman Ralph Bauer, who

proposed banning live-aboards, both said they want to work together with

the city to work out a solution.

Councilman Ralph Bauer first introduced the idea of preventing

overnight stays in the harbor at a recent City Council meeting to help

reduce the pollution that has plagued the harbor and beaches for years.

Current city law allows boaters to stay on their vessels for up to 72

hours at a time.

“But when do those 72 hours begin and end,” Bauer said. “Someone might

come home at night and live on their boat until they have to go to work

the next day.”

Working with the boating group to design an ordinance that enforces

and prevents boaters from flushing waste into the harbor is one of

Bauer’s new goals.

“Right now it’s literally impossible to catch [boaters] in the act,”

Bauer said. “It’s all about designing an enforceable ordinance with

limited manpower to prevent flushing into the [harbor]. But [pollution

from boaters] is just one element of the pollution problem in the

harbor.”

Bauer cited urban runoff as another pollution source.

Wilson lives and has a boat in the harbor, and feels that penalizing

boaters for the pollution problems of the harbor is unfair.

“We want to show that boaters are responsible and penalizing them is

not the solution to the problem,” Wilson said. “Boaters typically police

themselves.”

Wilson is willing to work with the city and other organizations

because he said boaters have an interest in a clean harbor.