This announcement came hours after the state announced a lawsuit to sue the city.

Huntington Beach has struck back. 

The city announced its own lawsuit against the state of California on March 9 regarding the number of housing units it is being forced to accommodate. The lawsuit was filed in federal court. This came just hours after California state officials announced their own plans to sue Huntington Beach over its own housing decisions. 

Huntington Beach Mayor Tony Strickland explained the state is attempting to “urbanize” the city. Strickland asserted mandating housing across affordability levels would transform Huntington Beach into something that looked more like Los Angeles or San Francisco.

“Our citizens don’t want to live in an urban coastal community,” said Strickland.

The city’s 60-page lawsuit hinges on two key arguments. First, the lawsuit points out Huntington Beach is a charter city. As a result, it claims the city has more autonomy than a typical city or town, thus making it immune to state housing laws. Secondly, the complaint asserts the mandate violates both the U.S. and state constitutions. 

It argues that if the mandate is permitted to proceed, California “will continue with an unbridled power play to control all aspects fo the City Council’s land use decisions in order to eliminate the suburban character of the city and replace it with a high-density mecca.” The suit says this crowded mecca would be attained through “forced rezoning.”

Huntington Beach City Councilman Casey McKeon blasted the mandate, saying the number of housing requested in the city was not realistic. 

“The (Regional Housing Needs Allocation) numbers are fraudulent,” he said, adding the city is not against reasonable development. “We want to be good neighbors and help housing needs.”

McKeon specifically pointed to the 8,000 units requested of San Bernardino City, which houses about the same population as Huntington Beach. Huntington Beach has been asked to allocate more than 13,000 units.  

“California is by far the most expensive state to build in,” McKeon continued. “The overreach is driving up the cost of housing. We want to work with the local economy and make the job market strong, so we can create an environment where people can live here. We want to do that through our own local economy.”

Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Bonta blasted Huntington Beach officials, arguing they were violating laws intentionally.

“Huntington Beach is required to plan for 13,368 new housing units over the next eight years. They are also required to follow state housing law, just like every other place in California. They are refusing to do both of these things,” a governor’s office release said.

“Anything short of wholesale change shows a rubber stamping of the status quo,” Huntington Beach Mayor Tony Strickland said.

The Huntington Beach City Council voted Jan. 17 to change their rate plan with the Orange County Power Authority, saving taxpayers over $200,000 every year. 

The new plan will take Huntington Beach’s energy accounts from OCPA’s most ardent option, called the “100 percent renewable energy plan,” to the 38 percent option. 

The non-profit Orange County Power Authority (OCPA) was launched in December 2020 with a mission to offer green energy to the residents of Orange County, at a price comparable to Southern California Edison. 

But the fledgling OCPA has had a rough start, with questions about the experience and transparency of leadership, and the inability of the authority to deliver the promised rates and adequately advise customers of the various service options. 

The power authority’s CEO Brian Proboisky has also come under scrutiny for his inexperience in energy matters. 

“You should get someone who is a technocrat,” Huntington Beach Mayor Tony Strickland stated. “If you know their politics, then they’re not the right person for a position of that magnitude.”

The Huntington Beach City Council’s vote of 4-3 demonstrated the council’s attempts to balance fiscal responsibility to taxpayers with an environmentally conscientious option, utilizing the OCPA’s Basic Choice Plan. Councilmember Casey McKeon suggested the savings could be used for other city needs like enforcing the city laws regarding homelessness.

The vote fell along elected lines, with Mayor Tony Strickland, Mayor Pro Tem Gracey Van Der Mark, and Councilmembers Casey McKeon and Pat Burns, all whom were elected this past November, voting to save taxpayers money. The other councilmembers, Natalie Moser, Dan Kalmick, and Rhonda Bolton, voted against the plan.

OCPA’s policy of automatically enrolling residents brought transparency questions to the forefront as customers found higher power prices and difficulties with the process of opting-out of the program.

Strickland noted, “It really became a basic back door tax increase. It made it incredibly hard to opt out.”

The vote by Huntington Beach City Council comes on the heels of an exit by the Orange County Board of Supervisors to withdraw from service following an audit which found that Southern California Edison offered residents prices that were 7 percent cheaper than OCPA. 

OCPA responded by stating the exit “removes consumer choice and market competition, adds dirty power to the energy grid, raises rates, and creates an unnecessary liability for the county.”

Strickland said, “Any government organization that begins with serious questions of leadership qualification, basic transparency failures, early executive resignations, city investigations, county investigations, state investigations, grand jury reports, and even whistleblower complaints needs more than just a look in the mirror.”

Despite these changes, OCPA still has more than 211,000 customers and said they plan to provide more information to member agencies through a series of town halls and public meetings.

Will some cities lose control over housing development?

A number of cities in Orange County failed to meet the Oct. 15, 2021 deadline to have their housing element plans approved. For Orange County, the requirement to update comes every eight years and is part of the General Plan of the jurisdiction.

The state requires cities to have housing element plans that show how the city will plan for the future housing needs of its community. They should include plans for increased population, affordable housing for lower income brackets, and mixed-use housing options among other elements.

The Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) which includes the counties of Imperial, Ventura, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Orange, was directed by the state Department of Housing and Community Development, to provide over 1.3 million new housing units between 2021 to 2029, of those, Orange County is required to build 10,406 units.

Sixty percent of Orange County’s cities failed to have an approved housing element plan by the deadline. Several cities submitted plans but had them repeatedly rejected by the state.

Although there is a grace period of 120 days after the deadline, that time has expired. The consequences for non-compliance vary. A city may be given a shorter period of time to develop residential zoning, the state can take legal action after giving warnings, the city can lose funding grants for housing development or the city can be subject to a builder’s remedy.

Under the builder’s remedy, housing developers get the greenlight to construct housing for moderate-income households or build dwellings that cater for low income families with twenty percent of the units designated as such. The builder gets the option to forego the city’s zoning and general plan as well.

Last year Santa Monica failed to get a state approved housing plan. Developers saw an opportunity to bypass a lengthy process of approvals and took it. Santa Monica City Council was caught off guard by the number of builder’s remedy applications which do not need city council approval to move forward. Fourteen Projects amounting to about 5,000 new units are making their way through the automatic approval process as a result.

The Orange County cities that met the deadline and have implemented their housing element plans are: Brea, Cypress, Dana Point, Fountain Valley, Irvine, Newport Beach, Rancho Santa Margarita, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Ana, Stanton, Tustin, and Yorba Linda.