The Parkside Letters (Background)

Here's some background on Parkside Estates, to accompany posts regarding letters received by the California Coastal Commission from a sixth grade class in La Palma, California, about a proposed development in Huntington Beach, California.

La Palma is nine miles from the coast, but it appears these kids were taken on a tour of the Bolsa Chica wetlands, which are next door to the site where Parkside is to be built. It's a 50-acre bean field that's been in agricultural production for at least 50 years. The developer proposes to build 155 homes there (the letters cite 170 homes, a previous number that was reduced to appease the Coastal Commission staff), along with parks -- but that's just the beginning. The developer has agreed to:

• Make flood improvements that will remove some 5,000 homes and businesses from the floodplain, saving homeowners $500 to $1,000 a year.
• Replace several thousand feet of aging levees with new ones that meet FEMA standards.
• Build a natural treatment system for stormwater that will treat all the project runoff, plus about half of the dry-weather runoff from a 1,200-acre watershed that is currently polluting the ocean.
• Protect, enhance and enlarge identified wetlands on the property.
• Maintain a 100-meter buffer from some scragly, poor quality, non-native eucalyptus trees that have been declared an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area.
  

In other words, it is a hyper-sensitive development. The cost of the regional flood control and other improvements could add as much as $100,000 to the cost of each home.