Shea expected to request postponement

After a rollercoaster week in which both sides scrambled to react to new information from state officials, the Parkside Estates housing development was ready to go before the Coastal Commission Wednesday afternoon. What was less clear, as of the Independent’s deadline for publication, was whether it would come to a final vote.

Members of the Bolsa Chica Land Trust and other opponents of the project next to the Bolsa Chica wetlands planned to press their case, heartened by a new staff report that recommends many of their proposed restrictions on building. But a spokesman for developer Shea Properties complained the company was not given time to prepare a rebuttal and called the commission’s unwillingness to allow a postponement frustrating.

Land Trust members said they suspected the city and developer would try to ask for a postponement at the meeting, despite such a request being denied last week. The commission let one part of the permit application be resubmitted and pushed back to a later date, but another part containing many of the most contentious issues can’t be moved.

“Their interpretation of the Coastal Act is they cannot postpone that action,” city planning director Scott Hess said. “It has to be taken by July 12.”

A Shea spokesman said it wasn’t likely the company would get the whole issue moved back, but he left the option open.

“The only way [a postponement’s] on the table any more is if the commissioners bring it up and ask the staff to reopen it,” spokesman Laer Pearce said. “It’s only in the commissioners’ hands now.”

Parkside opponents expressed hope that they would either win a decisive victory — getting much more of the land declared protected wetlands — or at worst force Shea Properties to delay its application for months or years to come.

“I don’t exactly know when the earliest opportunity would be for a rematch at this point,” said Land Trust member and anti-Parkside activist Mark Bixby. “Shea would probably go off and lick their wounds for a while.”

Assuming withdrawal is impossible, the developer will try to get commissioners to return to its own proposal, or at least earlier staff proposals Shea found more favorable to its plans, Pearce said.

“We see no evidence that causes us to waver, beyond some adjustments here or there, from the same plan we had all along,” Pearce said. “The new staff report represented a complete change in direction and was based on no new data. They suddenly up and changed their mind.”

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QUESTION OF THE WEEK

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