A petition has been circulated in Huntington Harbour to fight the
suggestion of banning overnight stays and live-aboards in the harbor.
The Safe Boating Institute has collected 800 signatures this week with
hopes of discussing the matter with the Huntington Beach City Council in
a couple of weeks.
The group's president Rod Wilson and City Councilman Ralph Bauer, who
proposed banning live-aboards, both said they want to work together with
the city to work out a solution.
Councilman Ralph Bauer first introduced the idea of preventing
overnight stays in the harbor at a recent City Council meeting to help
reduce the pollution that has plagued the harbor and beaches for years.
Current city law allows boaters to stay on their vessels for up to 72
hours at a time.
"But when do those 72 hours begin and end," Bauer said. "Someone might
come home at night and live on their boat until they have to go to work
the next day."
Working with the boating group to design an ordinance that enforces
and prevents boaters from flushing waste into the harbor is one of
Bauer's new goals.
"Right now it's literally impossible to catch [boaters] in the act,"
Bauer said. "It's all about designing an enforceable ordinance with
limited manpower to prevent flushing into the [harbor]. But [pollution
from boaters] is just one element of the pollution problem in the
harbor."
Bauer cited urban runoff as another pollution source.
Wilson lives and has a boat in the harbor, and feels that penalizing
boaters for the pollution problems of the harbor is unfair.
"We want to show that boaters are responsible and penalizing them is
not the solution to the problem," Wilson said. "Boaters typically police
themselves."
Wilson is willing to work with the city and other organizations
because he said boaters have an interest in a clean harbor.
