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Coastal Commission rejects Newport Harbor proposal to try reconfigured mooring field

February 8, 2025

City plans to try out condensing an offshore mooring field in Newport Harbor to make more space for navigation and tidy up the cluster of boats has been shot down by the California Coastal Commission.

The commission’s nearly unanimous vote earlier in the week delighted boaters who had voiced concerns over the proposal – they argued it would instead make navigation unsafe and the city didn’t even consider the larger Newport Beach Yacht Club mooring field nearby for the pilot project, which the public boaters took as discrimination.

The proposed plan was to be launched at the 5.5-acre mooring field north of Balboa Peninsula and east of Bay Island and would have added seven new city-owned moorings for a total of 62 – and they would have been charged a much higher fee. Another recent proposal to increase mooring fees – to better match market rates and recoup harbor costs, city officials said – is on hold while the State Lands Commission reviews the plan that would also move the mooring permits to a city licensing program. Mooring permits have long been a commodity privately traded and sold for often large amounts of money.

Boats moor at public mooring field (C) in Newport Harbor in Newport Beach, CA on Friday, Feb. 7, 2025. The field is north of Balboa Peninsula and east of Bay Island. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)

“I’m very concerned with the comments heard today around safety and what appears to be a lack of communication between the mooring holders in that field and the harbor and the port commission,” said Justin Cummings, the commission’s chairperson. “There are rare instances where you have a group of people impacted that are all 100% against the proposal that’s come before us. There’s not a single mooring holder today that’s said they would be OK with this. To have an entire group say, ‘We don’t support this and are concerned for our safety,’ really makes me want to support them in this.”

“I do hope we can find a way forward between the harbor and the users so that we can create something that increases access and provides for a higher level of safety and environmental improvements,” he added.

The Newport Harbor is one of the largest small-craft recreational harbors on the West Coast with 1,200 moorning, of which 800 are offshore. If the proposed configuration proved successful, Newport Beach officials said it would be replicated in the harbor’s nine other public fields. There are three private boating groups that use mooring fields with city permits, but are given autonomy to operate and configure their sections.

“We went in there thinking they had the staff recommendation ready to approve,” said Chris Bliss, a Dana Point boater who has moored his boat in Newport Harbor for years. “We were all kind of down. At the end, it was the most incredible redemption. We’ve talked to the city and they have been completely deaf and blind. It was a fantastic outcome.”

The mooring reconfiguration, which would have changed single moorings to double-row moorings was designed, city officials said, after listening to public comments from commercial operators, homeowners associations and yacht clubs. A harbor subcommittee has been looking since 2018 at how to improve the mooring fields, making them safer, but also clearing more space for other harbor users.

“I’m disappointed with the outcome,” said Paul Blank, the city’s harbor master. He said the plan was vetted in multiple public and private forums, including with Newport Beach Mooring Association representatives.

“I believe the project would have significantly improved navigability in and around the mooring field,” he said. “We have evidence for this from third-party independent sources.”

The current mooring field, city staff said, poorly utilizes the open water space and reduces the “navigable waterways between the mooring rows.” The proposed changes would decrease the footprint of the mooring field and result in an increase of open water space surrounding the field by 2 acres, they said.

The proposed double-row design replicates San Diego’s America’s Cup Harbor.

But speakers at the commission meeting – there were at least 40 experienced boaters and captains – pointed to the differences between the two harbors and showed videos of why they did not think the proposal would work.

Newport Harbor has stronger tides and winds than the smaller and more protected San Diego harbor, they argued.

They said the new layout, which they thought would provide limited protection from offshore winds, currents and extreme seasonal tides, would make it much harder to navigate with mooring rows configured in tandem compared to the existing single rows.

The new configuration would be complicated for older, disabled and novice boaters, increasing the risk of collisions while reducing overall access, speakers said.

And they also argued there was the appearance of discrimination when comparing the space in the private yacht club mooring fields to those used by the “working class demographic,” which they said would have been forced into a denser configuration.

“The double-row plan is framed as an improvement, but this one makes using the mooring more dangerous,” said Anne Stenton, president of the Newport Mooring Association. “Mooring a boat is not like parking a car. It’s more like landing an airplane given currents and winds that have to be accounted for. It requires a safe place on all four sides of a mooring in order to have time to react to conditions.”

Stenton added that the association is open to working with the city on improvements at the mooring fields, but the city has not engaged with their concerns, she said. “We fear this is being done to us, not with us.”

Coastal Commission rejects Newport Harbor proposal to try reconfigured mooring field Orange County Register

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Coastal Commission rejects Newport Harbor proposal to try reconfigured mooring field

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