Homes in technical quagmire

Newport Beach is inching toward adopting tougher rules to govern a wide variety of group homes, with the planning commission’s approval this week of revised rules the City Council shall see in November.

While the whole process of creating new group-home rules has been a legally thorny one, a few provisions of what the planning commission endorsed are likely to provoke council discussion.

For example, some residents have asked for a requirement that group-care homes, such as those for the elderly or recovering drug addicts, be at least 1,000 feet apart, and the commission agreed.

But it’s more complicated than that.

The 1,000-foot spacing requirement wouldn’t be citywide.

It would apply to a number of nonresidential uses — businesses, churches, schools and most group homes — that are in certain residential zones, such as Balboa Island, old Corona del Mar and West Newport, where the lots are small and close together and alleys between homes are narrow.

The commission chose to apply the rule that way because many of the impacts residents complain about — second-hand smoke, noise, and commercial trucks, for example — are more noticeable when neighbors are only a few feet away.

“The idea is that you wouldn’t have any one block with a concentration of uses that are not traditional residences,” city planner Patrick Alford said.

The city’s legal counsel has argued that courts have not upheld distancing requirements, and state legislators have rejected them in the past.

Another area where the council may stumble is how to bring existing facilities into compliance once new rules are in place.

The commission’s set of rules say the city would do an inventory of all the uses that don’t match zoning in residential districts and then address those — in some cases, perhaps, requiring them to move — over a two-year period.

All these provisions will be subjected to the scrutiny of new outside legal counsel, which the City Council is expected to hire shortly.

The biggest concern is likely to be whether new rules would be seen as discriminatory by a court if they’re challenged.

That issue frustrated some on the planning commission.

Commissioner Michael Toerge, who cast the one dissenting vote when the commission approved a draft of rules, said he’d rather be more aggressive first and let the rules be toned down later, if necessary.

“To me, we need to do something about it,” he said. “If the lawyers need to craft some kind of strategy to win a court suit, save it for the court.”

Commission Chairman Robert Hawkins said he expects hashing out how to bring facilities into compliance will be “somewhat problematic,” but he was glad to be able to send the rules on to the council.