The state agency charged with protecting California’s beaches is ready to savage Long Beach’s last wetlands for a much-needed Home Depot. Don’t look to city officials for help.

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

The fate of Long Beach’s last expanse of salvageable wetlands will be at stake when the California Coastal Commission meets next week, and the bad news is that the City of Long Beach is probably going to have a vote on the matter.

If it were up to the Coastal Commission staff, the Home Depot project—a proposal to build a 16-acre shopping-and-dining center next to the San Gabriel River, across the street from the Los Cerritos Wetlands and in the shadows of the AES power plant—would be shredded and scattered in the wind. And then, of course, each scrap would be picked up and deposited in the proper recycling container.

The Commission staff issued a long and damning report on Sept. 21 that rejected the development on just about every imaginable basis—including its impact on the environment, traffic congestion and public safety; the way it contradicts long-standing master zoning laws; and the stunning fact that the land parcel where it would be built isn’t even a legal lot.

But the actual Coastal Commission—its dozen voting members all appointed, half of them elected officials from throughout the state—don’t have to follow staff recommendations.

And Suja Lowenthal, the Second District City Councilmember who was rather mysteriously appointed as an alternate Coastal Commissioner in April, is one of them. She is expected to participate when the panel considers the Home Depot on Oct. 10 at the Crowne Plaza Harbor Hotel in San Pedro. If it’s up to Lowenthal, the endangered Belding’s savannah sparrow—one of several significant wetlands creatures in the development’s path—is a cooked goose.

Lowenthal’s position on the Home Depot project is clear: she’s for it. She was part of a 6-3 majority of the Long Beach City Council that voted to approve the development exactly one year ago—Oct. 3, 2006.“Instead of focusing on where development cannot occur, we ought to concentrate on where it can occur,” Lowenthal said that night before casting her vote—and after listening to a packed and highly charged crowd give more than six hours of testimony. “Long Beach is a built-out city. We have very few choices. We have very few opportunities.”

So she voted for the Home Depot—a little more than a month after the man who owns the proposed Home Depot land, Thomas Dean, made a $1,000 contribution to her campaign. State campaign records indicate Dean made that donation on Aug. 24, 2006. It was part of an approximately $30,000 haul that Lowenthal received that day—most of which came from the land-development community.

The next day, Dean and Home Depot signed a memorandum for a 20-year lease—which, perhaps significantly, is contingent on the project’s approval by government agencies. Agencies like the Coastal Commission.

A few days later, Sept. 1, 2006, Lowenthal reaped another financial harvest—this one of about $20,000. It included $1,000 from Chris Pook, the ubiquitous Long Beach promoter, who has been working with Home Depot to advance its project.

Lowenthal could not be reached for comment for this story. She was out of the country most of last week and declined through an aide to be interviewed until her scheduled Sept. 29 return. The District attempted to contact her that day, leaving interview requests at four different telephone numbers, but Lowenthal did not respond.

However, Lowenthal previously acknowledged that her support of the Home Depot development is all about the money—but she says it’s the $500,000 in annual sales-tax revenue that the shopping center is projected to generate for Long Beach’s cash-strapped coffers. She told the crowd at City Hall last year that she had agonized over the hard choices that Long Beach’s budget problems forced her to make.

“As someone who has always worshiped at the altar of good planning and development, it pains me greatly,” Lowenthal said that night. “But I am balancing what I know about land use in a perfect world with the realities of municipal financing. While this is in no way optimal, it is a reality left by Prop. 13.”

Others on the council echoed Lowenthal’s rationale—First District Councilmember Bonnie Lowenthal, when she made the motion to approve the Home Depot; Ninth District Councilmember Val Lerch, when he quickly seconded it; but mostly Third District Councilmember Gary DeLong, whose first priority when he joined the city council was to push for a drastic overhaul of the Local Coastal Plan that regulates development in the area. And their campaign accounts have all been sprinkled with contributions from people close to the project.

“Some kind of development will happen on the property,” DeLong asserted, continuing to shake the money tree. “We need it to pay for the things a good city needs—police protection and maintenance of infrastructure.”

Nobody’s denying the severity of Long Beach’s budget crisis. Mayor Bob Foster’s analogy that the city is “living paycheck-to-paycheck” has been quoted so often since he said it last summer that it’s reaching “Can’t we all just get along?” status. But it seems to be invoked quite conveniently—used as an opportunity by avaricious developers and as an excuse by ambitious politicians—by people who busily exchange greenbacks and blueprints while at best avoiding a search for radical, long-term solutions and at worst . . . well . . . making matters worse.

SUJA LOWENTHAL by DANIEL DE BOOM

The worst thing about the Home Depot development is not the Home Depot, not the accompanying retail shops, not even the indoor-outdoor restaurant, although dining in the shadow of huge power-plant smokestacks and a gut-turning sewer stench that even the Environmental Impact Report mentions—and emphasizes cannot be mitigated—probably won’t appeal to everybody.

No, the worst thing about the Home Depot is that it sets a precedent. Approving its construction will almost certainly pave the way—unfortunately, quite literally—to massive commercial and residential development of the Los Cerritos Wetlands area.

“This is the first piece of a larger puzzle—and it is the pivotal piece,” says Long Beach attorney Melvin Nutter, a former head of the California Coastal Commission who is fighting the Home Depot project. “If this is approved, it signals that the Local Coastal Program isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

And the land speculators and developers responsible for a flurry of land purchases in the wetlands area during the past few years appear to have been counting on that approval.

Thomas Dean is the name most often dropped in connection with the recent land grab, but don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of him—or if you’re sure you have heard of him, but can’t quite pinpoint where. That’s the way Dean does business.

Dean is a partner with Jeffrey Berger in Berger-Dean Marketing, and they are the up-front investors in Studebaker LB, LLC, which is the group that in late 2002 laid out $2.5 million for an unused tank farm amid the power plant complex on the east side of Studebaker Road where it intersects with Loynes Drive—the place where they now want to build a Home Depot.

Studebaker LB, LLC let the property lay idle for a few years, but in March 2005 it began borrowing heavily against the land in a series of transactions—perhaps as much as $8 million.

Meanwhile, Dean continued to form an untrackable number of other limited-liability corporations—with names like 3910 Seventh Street, LLC; 3910 Seventh Street B-d, LLC; Dominguez Hills/td, LLC; Studebaker-Loynes B-d, LLC . . . . All those B-d’s and td’s stand for Berger-Dean and Tom Dean. And all those limited-liability corporations refinanced and resold other pieces of surrounding property, sometimes to individuals within the LLCs. Understand that? Of course not. Nobody does. Also? Dean is also said to be close to purchasing the 180 acres of Bixby property at the heart of the wetlands.

Yes, lots of people are talking and worrying about this, and although it sounds strange to say considering Dean’s low public profile, the focus on his subtle movements may be diverting attention from a roster of much-more-prominent people who have clearly staked out their support for the Home Depot project—though why they favor it isn’t always clear.

Among them are Harbor Commission president James Hankla and former Harbor Commissioner John Hancock, renowned Long Beach attorney Doug Otto, real estate broker Gregory Gill. Most interesting is Pook, who is being paid by Home Depot to advance its cause. Why would an event promoter like Pook be valuable in a real estate deal like this? Perhaps because he is also intimately involved in campaign fund-raising for local candidates.

In 2005, as potential candidates began preparing to run for Long Beach government offices, Dean and others associated with the Home Depot project—and their wives and relatives and employees—began to contribute to various campaign war chests. By far, the most-favored recipients were council candidate DeLong and mayoral candidate Foster. Obviously, both won.

DeLong declined to take a firm position on the Home Depot project while he was campaigning, but it didn’t take him long to make up his mind once he was elected. In August of 2006, two months after taking office, DeLong was applauding enthusiastically when Home Depot signed its lease. A month later, he began meeting with a hand-picked committee—mostly deep-pocketed developers—to revise the master coastal zoning plan known as SEADIP.

Meanwhile, he embraced a massive development proposal by Lennar that sought to construct hundreds of condominiums on the site of the SeaPort Marina Hotel, and a piece of wetlands-adjacent land—the corner of Studebaker Road and Second Street—that has been zoned for business. But DeLong recently fought hard to deny a dancing permit to the Gaslamp Restaurant on the corner of Loynes and Pacific Coast Highway—perhaps not coincidentally a piece of land where developers have long-range hopes of building homes.

What’s holding up all these plans? Although environmentalists bemoan the effect of development on plant and animal habitat, not to mention the loss of the wetlands’ role in the very sustenance of life in Southern California, most people worry about what more homes and stores will do to the area’s already horrific traffic.

Traffic problems are the biggest threat to the proposed redevelopment of the dilapidated SeaPort Marina Hotel at Second Street and Pacific Coast Highway. After a few delays, that mixed-use project, which includes more than 400 homes, is scheduled to be considered by the city council on Nov. 13.

Likewise, the flurry of land sales that have occurred around the wetlands in the past five years will be useless to developers unless a solution can be found to the traffic issue.

But the Home Depot project comes with millions of dollars of traffic-mitigation plans in the vicinity of Studebaker Road and Loynes Drive, and if they are approved by the Coastal Commission they could be considered as traffic mitigation for other projects, too.

It’s almost as though the whole process is set up like dominos: 1) Home Depot is approved by the Coastal Commission on Oct. 10; 2) The Lennar condominium project—which had been delayed because of traffic concerns—comes before the Long Beach city council for approval in November; 3) The revisions to the SEADIP zoning plan—also hung-up over traffic—are approved; 4) Single-family and multi-family homes—which will be permitted under the new SEADIP and unencumbered by traffic concerns—are proposed at either end of Loynes Drive, where it meets Pacific Coast Highway and where it meets Studebaker Road; 5) Shopkeeper Road is extended through the Marketplace shopping center, mitigating more traffic so that 6) retail developments can be constructed at Studebaker and Second Street, and 7) the Pumpkin Patch area at the east end of Market Place can be developed, until, finally, after all that development and encroachment 8 ) the last little Sandy Beach tiger beetle dies.

Which brings us back to our representative—and the Sandy Beach tiger beetle’s representative—in all this, Second District Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal. Coastal Commissioner Larry Clark caught nearly everyone by surprise last April when he suddenly picked Lowenthal as his alternate. Lowenthal had barely gotten her seat warm on the Long Beach City Council; she’d been elected only 10 months earlier to complete the term of Second District Councilmember Dan Baker, who’d resigned amid a conflict-of-interest scandal.

“The reaction on the 14th floor of City Hall was, ‘Suja’s been appointed to what?’” recalled someone who works on that floor, where city council members have their offices. “Suja hadn’t been in office even a year, and she was already on the Coastal Commission?”

The ranks of the mystified included the man Lowenthal replaced as Clark’s alternate—Trent Orr, an environmental attorney for Earthjustice, the guy who recently won the federal case that reduced the amount of water channeled from Northern to Southern California because the pumps were killing an endangered species of smelt.

Clark did not return six phone messages left at Rancho Palos Verdes City Hall requesting an interview about his appointment of Lowenthal, and his lack of accountability turns out to be characteristic. The day after the appointment was made change last April, the deposed Orr told Bill Pearl of LBreport.com that Clark didn’t give him a reason. Last week, Orr told The District that he still hasn’t.

“All I can do is speculate,” Orr said, then proceeded to do just that: “I think it’s pretty much a matter of politics.”

Politics? As in strings being pulled to appoint Lowenthal as an alternate Coastal Commissioner six months ago? After she’d accepted those campaign contributions; after she’d cast her city council vote—specifically so she could vote in favor of the Home Depot project when the panel convenes next week? That kind of “matter of politics”?

Orr let the question hang for a few moments while he emitted one of those anything’s-possible chuckles, but he didn’t give the conspiracy theory much credence when he finally answered.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “It seems like kind of a stretch.”

Does it really? It’s Long Beach, Trent.

Tags: california coastal commission, home depot, suja lowenthal, wetlands