Agency still seeks fixes for damaged wetlands

Recent announcements by Huntington Beach-based Mills Land and Water Company of the retirement of its longtime president and closing of its office won’t likely change the regulatory scrutiny it is facing, officials said. That’s partially because agencies’ top priority is getting damaged wetlands fixed, and any penalties would be aimed at the company as a whole, regulators said.

“The outcome we would like to see is that any wetland areas that have been improperly affected by construction activity get restored,” said Mark Adelson, a senior environmental scientist with the Santa Ana Water Quality Control Board.

Regulators said workers replaced gravel on a parking lot at the Mills-owned Cabrillo Mobile Home Park on Pacific Coast Highway, and drained water and pulled out plants from protected wetlands. A Mills spokeswoman said the company was in touch with regulators, and officials from various agencies confirmed that.

“They’ve hired a biologist to determine what the characteristics of the site are and what needs to be restored,” said Andrew Willis, a district enforcement analyst with the California Coastal Commission. “They’ve asked until end of the month to put that kind of information together for us, and we granted that extension.”

Though the company’s 25-year president Robert Moore Jr. retired as of April 8, not long after news of the reported violation broke, regulators said their attention won’t be on him.

“The penalties we would be seeking would be administrative penalties,” fines for the company as a whole, Adelson said. “There’s no determination made in our process about whether or not a civil violation has occurred or criminal violation has occurred.”

But the Coastal Commission is looking for some restitution to make up for the time the valuable wetlands are out of commission, Willis said.

“At this point the site is obviously not functioning as it was in the past,” he said. “We’d want some mitigation for the temporal loss as well as for the physical loss itself.”

MICHAEL ALEXANDER may be reached at (714) 966-4618 or at michael.alexander@latimes.com.