Balboa Marina West restaurant gets Newport council’s OK, with added noise measures
Plans for a waterfront restaurant along East Coast Highway in the spot that once was home to the Reuben E. Lee riverboat will move forward with several changes intended to minimize noise impact on the neighborhood.
The Newport Beach City Council voted unanimously Tuesday night to reject an appeal from a homeowners association that hoped to overturn the Planning Commission’s approval of the 14,252-square-foot restaurant planned near Bayside Drive and the Coast Highway bridge.
The Irvine Co., which owns the 3.5-acre parcel, proposes to build eight new public boat slips, reconfigure the private Balboa Marina and add 24 new slips, and build the restaurant — billed as a fine-dining establishment — as part of its Balboa Marina West project.
The Linda Isle Homeowner Assn. filed an appeal less than a week after the Planning Commission voted unanimously in December to issue a conditional use permit for the restaurant building, which would feature outdoor dining, full alcoholic beverage service and live entertainment.
The one-story restaurant design is expected to be contemporary, with a sliding glass wall system, a metal roof with skylights, decorative steel accents and a patio. The restaurant could be open from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily. Dancing would not be permitted, according to city documents.
Linda Isle homeowners say the proposal fails to mitigate potential noise from live entertainment continuing until the early morning and that residents would be disrupted by the glare from patrons’ headlights shining across the water into their homes.
Dan Miller, a senior vice president with the Irvine Co., agreed Tuesday to place locks on sliding glass doors on the southwest portion of the restaurant to deter customers from opening the doors and allowing noise to travel into nearby homes. Miller also agreed to install triple-glazed glass on the southern portion of the building in an effort to further reduce noise.
But Linda Isle resident Margo O’Connor said the additional measures are not enough and took issue with the hours the restaurant would keep. The entertainment noise would travel into the second floor of homes and keep residents from sleeping before 2 a.m., she said.
“Fine dining does not take place from 10 p.m. to 2 in the morning,” O’Connor said. “Those hours describe a nightclub. This is going to be the largest restaurant/nightclub in Newport Beach and it’s yards away from an established residential community.”
The Linda Isle Homeowner Assn. also alleged in its appeal that the city violated the California Environmental Quality Act by approving an environmental review before looking at the restaurant’s final design. The group asked for a new environmental review.
The Planning Commission unanimously approved the review in 2014. However, the restaurant’s design was not finalized at the time, so commissioners asked the Irvine Co. to return with that portion, which was approved in December.
City staff said no additional study was needed because the project that planning commissioners approved was significantly smaller than what was studied in the environmental review.
Councilman Ed Selich said the Reuben E. Lee, which opened in the 1950s and housed a restaurant and then a nautical museum before it was dismantled in 2008, operated in the same area with fewer conditions and no noise mitigation measures.
