Harbor District’s future is under review

“Zero sphere of influence”, while it’s a source of major irritation to the Harbor District, was described by LAFCo staff as “a term of art” and therefore not easy to change. (They are trying to come up with an alternative.) What it means is that the District could be dissolved because another agency (in this case the County) could take over all the functions. I attended the LAFCo meeting, and heard nothing that would imply that dissolution is on anyone’s agenda. LAFCo will not initiate dissolution proceedings. Any affected government agency in the County (at a minimum, that’s 20 cities and 25 special districts) could submit an application to dissolve the Harbor District. Such an application would have to include a “plan for service” showing how the current services would be provided and funded after dissolution. Also, citizens could petition for dissolution.

The majority of what’s written in the Daily Journal article is correct, but there’s also a lot that’s not. Take it with a big grain of salt. (They didn’t even get correct what LAFCo stands for.)

Leonard,

Just musing, but do you suppose the supes decision to allow relatively little development on the Burnham Strip in the LCP revision is mostly about driving another nail in the coffin of the Harbor District (which pleaded for greater development options on the strip as they have used the developable value of their property to collateralize a big loan)?

Or were they just tossing a crumb to those who want the strip open to preserve Burnham’s plan while they further overburden the community with development elsewhere?

Carl May

Carl, any answer I give would be little more than idle speculation. Some of us have discussed the “why”, but we really don’t know. The idea in your first paragraph never came up in our discussions. The idea in your second paragraph is certainly a possibility. But we do hope that the real reason is a combination of taking into account the widespread strong community feeling against houses there and that they finally understood the historic significance of the Burnham Plan which calls for a 2000’ open space buffer between the town and the ocean.

The Strip is all that’s left of that 2000’ open space buffer after the highway construction and beach erosion. The erosion rate was greatly increased due to the breakwater construction in 1959. Here’s a thought: since the harbor caused the loss of much of the buffer strip, they owe it to the community to keep the remaining few hundred feet as open space.

Would the Supervisors actively try to sabotage the Harbor District? I seriously doubt it. Rather, they probably just had no sympathy for the district, and other concerns were a higher priority. They made the right decision; let’s support it.