Coastal panel OKs Pebble Beach area development

The California Coastal Commission voted unanimously to allow Pebble Beach Co. to build 90 homes in Monterey County's Del Monte Forest. The company can also build a new, 100-unit hotel on the former site of Spyglass Quarry and expand its current Lodge at Pebble Beach.

The plan also will preserve 635 acres of native forest and improve public access to the site for generations to come.

The compromise ended a decades-long battle over the pristine land, which is visible by motorists on the famed 17-mile drive near the famous Pebble Beach Golf Links.

"It shows that development and environmental interests can be successfully balanced when there is an up-front commitment to resource protection and working collaboratively with (the) commission," Charles Lester, the commission's executive director, said Wednesday.

The fight became pitched when Eastwood, Arnold Palmer and former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth's group bought the site in 1999 and proposed to develop a play land for the wealthy — a new golf course, revamped polo fields and 100 new mansions on a much bigger swatch of forestland.

The commission, with jurisdiction over the entire 1,100 miles of California coastline, rejected the plan in 2007 after county voters had approved it. The commission said it violated the law.

The rejection came after Eastwood himself made pleas in television commercials on behalf the larger plan, which the company had marketed as the Pebble Beach Co. Preservation and Development Plan, a name derided by critics as misleading. That original plan would have set aside about 425 acres of the forest, but an environmental review later determined it would have also destroyed about 17,160 native Monterey pines.

The new plan would clear about 6,673 trees on about 56 acres for the homes.

Del Monte Forest is one of only five places in the world where the Monterey pine trees are found, and is also host to a rare orchid species and the endangered California red-legged frog.