UPDATED

The Coastal Commission has given a mixed response to the city on its request to pull a permit application for the long-contentious Parkside housing development near the Bolsa Chica, city officials said.

The city and developer Shea Properties now appear to be faced with a tough choice: letting a deadline expire and facing a major delay in the permit process, or going up to the commission’s meeting Wednesday knowing that a staff report on the issue supports many of Parkside opponents’ positions.

Such permits come in two halves; without both parts debated and passed by the commission, nothing can be built. The commission has allowed the city to pull and resubmit one half, moving the July 12 deadline on a decision back another year, said city Director of Planning Scott Hess. But the commission told Hess that the other half, which includes many of the most contentious issues in the staff report such as what areas are wetlands, can’t be put back on the calendar so easily if it’s removed.

Developer Shea Properties and city officials will meet Friday to discuss their options, Hess said. But he is “90% sure we’re still going up there,” he said.

The California Coastal Commission was scheduled to make a major decision next week on the permit for the controversial Parkside Estates housing development next to the Bolsa Chica Wetlands. But a late request by the city to pull the item from discussion left the whole debate up in the air.

As Shea Properties and its opponents, the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, prepared for a showdown, a Coastal Commission staff report released Friday seemed to give Parkside opponents a huge boost. But the city says Shea doesn’t have enough time to come up with a response, so it wanted to pull the request, file it again and reset the clock to allow a new meeting in October in San Pedro.

The recommendation could change Shea’s case so radically that there should be more time to prepare, Hess said.

“It’s an inadequate amount of time to evaluate and be prepared for a public hearing next week,” he said.

But the conservationists with the Bolsa Chica Land Trust and its allies, feeling vindicated by a report that they feel supports their cause, took heart.

“We’re interpreting this as a good thing, because clearly it means Shea doesn’t think they can prevail at this time at the commission,” said activist and Land Trust member Mark Bixby, who runs a mailing list on Parkside issues.

The report released Friday appeared to have handed Parkside opponents some significant gains, representatives of both sides of the debate said. It recommends protecting more of the property as wetlands, is stricter about what can be built in buffer zones around those areas, and suggests that human activities have shrunk the wetlands over the last few decades.

Opponents of the Parkside development see the report as a boost to their cause, said Bolsa Chica Land Trust Executive Director Flossie Horgan. Her group argued to the commission in May that earlier staff reports hadn’t taken enough wetlands into account.

“It sounds like they have heard what we were trying to say,” she said. “It’s not hard to understand why they would come to this awareness. The Bolsa Chica’s one large ecosystem, and the Shea property’s part of the Bolsa Chica.”

Shea spokesman Laer Pearce said the report was “flip-flopping” on previous positions, punishing the developer for trying to follow earlier rules. Finding a way to develop the property has become extremely difficult, he said.

“The only way we can see this is as a deliberate effort to kill this project,” he said. “We’re trying to see if there’s a way we can pencil this out, but frankly, they’re only giving us 17 acres for us to make the money we need to make on that.”

If the city does not pull the rest of the permit despite the consequences, the commission will discuss the application on July 11 at its meeting in San Luis Obispo.