Condominiums Move Closer for Landfill in Huntington Beach

Ascon Properties moved one step closer Tuesday night to building hundreds of condominiums on its contaminated former landfill behind Edison High School.

The Huntington Beach City Council voted 4 to 3 in favor of a General Plan amendment changing the property’s designated land use from public, quasi-public and institutional to residential, with the possibility of up to 600 condominiums. The actual number of condominiums will be decided later.

While the approval is necessary for the developer to proceed with the project, it still is conditioned on numerous incomplete environmental studies now under way as to precisely how the landfill--declared a hazardous waste site by the state--can be cleaned up.

About 250 people attended the council meeting, most of them favoring no development on the property or, at most, single-family homes.

T.K. Brimer told the council that he had made some good land buys and some bad buys, but unlike Ascon, “I never had the nerve to come to the city to bail me out of one of my bad buys.”

But David Johnson argued that the council should do whatever it can to get the hazardous site cleaned up and urged approval of the condominium project. He said it would be “removing an eyesore and a hazardous area.”

Most everyone living around the parcel and its two hazardous waste pits have complained of noxious odors in past years, and Ascon subsequently covered one of the pits. And some residents said that they would opt for the dump over a development that, inevitably, will increase traffic.

Ascon Vice President John Lindsey said consultants have estimated that it will cost the firm between $10 million and $15 million to remove the hazardous substances from the now empty, 39 1/2-acre parcel, which was used as a waste-disposal site for oil field operations from 1938 to 1972.

Most of the hazardous materials are low-grade petroleum products that can be treated on the site, according to a study conducted for Ascon by Radion Corp. However, some of the more highly toxic substances, such as styrene tar, will have to be hauled from the property to an Arkansas disposal site--a more costly task.

Ascon officials contend that they must build a project with more density than single-family homes in order to recoup the firm’s substantial financial investment to clean up the site. Preliminary studies by the city’s consultant, Kaiser-Marsten, suggest that a less dense development might generate income “adequate” to cover cleanup costs, plus a profit.