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Allowing more than a thousand new homes and a hotel to be built on Banning Ranch would make traffic unbearable and rob Newport Beach and Costa Mesa of precious natural scenery, according to activists who held a public meeting Monday to drive home their points.

The Save the Banning Ranch Task Force, a coalition dedicated to stopping the development, met at the Costa Mesa Neighborhood Community Center, in a room paid for by member Chris Bunyan, for a series of presentations highlighting all of the negative impacts a development might have. Bunyan has said he might run for the Costa Mesa City Council.

Opponents say it would put thousands more cars on roadways like the 55 Freeway, which are already stressed, and would rob locals of potential trails and recreation areas.

“Let’s let the public tour the heck out of that land, then vote on whether something like this gets developed. What the owners are trying to do is push this through very quickly, behind the scenes, before the public knows what it’s going to lose,” said Kevin Nelson, who gave a slide presentation of Banning Ranch’s scenery.

He showed pictures of canyons filled with trees, fields of lavender flowers and waterways off limits to the public, attempting to show the roughly 50-person audience the possibilities the land offers.

The property’s owners, a consortium of companies called Newport Banning Ranch LLC, say they are giving the community a deal by only developing 30% of the land. The plan they propose would develop the southeastern portion, and leave the northwestern portion as open space.

Traffic studies and environmental impact reports have not been completed, so the owners haven’t proposed any plans to lessen the impact the development may have, but they say such studies are coming.

“A traffic report, an air quality analysis will all have to be reviewed and certified by the City Council in Newport Beach, to determine whether the development is something the site and community could bear,” said Marice White, a spokeswoman for the ownership group.

The compromise the owners offer is not really a compromise at all because the land they aren’t going to touch couldn’t be developed in the first place, Bunyan said.

“You cannot develop on the Lower Mesa. There’s no way the California Coastal Commission would let them build that close to wetlands,” Bunyan said.

The owners think they could develop more and say they are not proposing to because they want to keep walking space for residents and preserve views for neighboring communities.

The task force wants to see the land in the hands of Newport Beach, so that it could be preserved and turned into land that could be used by the communities surrounding it.

An unbiased appraisal has not been done on the land, but some estimates of its worth are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. With public and private funds, the land could be bought from Newport Banning Ranch LLC, Terry Welsh, the head of the task force, proposed.

“We see the property being purchased from the owners at a price that is not only reasonable to the city but reasonable to the owners, because they have a right to the land,” Welsh said.

Newport Beach Councilman Keith Curry was in attendance. The developers hope to present a comprehensive plan to Newport Beach within a few weeks.

ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at alan.blank@latimes.com.