EDITORIAL:Mountain of landslide costs

Bluebird Canyon landslide fix costs keep escalating and so does the time frame for completion of the massive job of rebuilding a neighborhood that nature destroyed.

Community Recovery Coordinator Bob Burnham is pushing back the projected completion date for repairs by five months — from the end of March to the end of August.

If — and that may be a big if — “buildable” lots are restored to the area by then, it will mean the Flamingo Road area will have been uninhabitable for more than two years following the June 1, 2005 disaster.

Families are still living in donated mobile homes on Canyon Acres, and the City Council is still declaring “the presence of an emergency” in the city every month.

The original estimate of costs was $16 million, which was upgraded to $20.5 million in September.

Now that figure — still an estimate — has zoomed to $28 million, approaching a doubling of the cost.

Burnham and city officials don’t seem worried by the fact that they will have to get the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to agree to pay for costs incurred after the original deadline of March 31.

But that is a concern.

FEMA was none too ready to foot the bill to repair the infrastructure and make the area safe immediately after the landslide; we hope Laguna officials are right that the deadline will be able to be extended.

Burnham has been appealingly forthright about the “mistakes” that were made in estimating the amount of dirt that needed to be excavated and the length of time needed to push that dirt back and forth around the small canyon site to rebuild the hillside.

Residents in the area have been living with a “moving mountain” of dirt for many months now, and that can’t be very pleasant.

We hope that FEMA is as forgiving as the community seems to be for the unfortunate optimism that may have obscured the realities of this difficult project.

We hope that optimism doesn’t extend to the apparent surety that FEMA will come through for the city once again.

If costs keep soaring and FEMA isn’t forthcoming, the city may have to go back to the voters again with that dreaded “B” word — a bond — to fund repairs.