Plans for a 30-unit housing development on Melba Road and a nearly 200-unit apartment complex on Clark Avenue can both proceed as planned, the Encinitas City Council decided Wednesday.

After hours of public debate and discussion, the council voted 4-0 to deny the Melba Alliance for a Safe and Healthy Environment’s appeal of a September City Planning Commission decision to approve permits for the controversial Melba Road project.

Project opponents, who included about a dozen public speakers at Wednesday’s hearing, raised some topics worth discussing, such as contaminated land issues and landscaping concerns, but the information they provided did not meet the high state standards required to prevent the project from continue, councilors said. Councilor Joy Lyndes, who lives near the site, did not participate in the vote or discussion due to a conflict of interest. Other councilors said they were sorry to reject the appeal.

“Right now I see no basis for me to deny the project, I wish I could,” Councilman Bruce Ehlers said before the vote.

Councilwoman Kellie Hinze said Wednesday’s hearing was something “I wasn’t looking forward to” and mentioned that she has loved watching wildlife at the proposed development site since she was a child.

Project developer Torrey Pacific Corp. proposes that 30 homes, of which three are set aside for low-income earners, be placed on an almost 6.5-hectare property. The former greenhouse site, known as the Staver property, is near Oak Crest Middle School in the 1200 block of Melba Road.

Brian Staver, whose family has owned the property for decades and whose father was born there in 1954, called it an “environmentally responsible place to put 30 homes,” saying it’s close to many schools and other facilities. He said project developers had “repeatedly revised” their plans based on opponents’ requests, noting that developers are now proposing to preserve a row of trees along Melba Road — something that required special council approval because it needed an exemption from the city’s sidewalk construction standards.

Preserving the trees along the road is the area the two groups agree on, both sides said. Many other mature trees on the property will be removed under the development plans, and this has been a major source of conflict with neighbours. Some of them said Wednesday that developers plan to plant slender “little sticks” to replace large, animal-friendly trees.

The developer also gets an exemption from urban development standards because the project includes three low-income houses. Staver said these will be occupancy-restricted homes, not tiny apartments like some other state-authorized, housing density bonus projects, and the city will benefit greatly from that. Opponents cited that the site featured three lower rents before development plans moved forward, and they say Encinitas really isn’t getting anything out of this development deal.

“We are not opposed to the project,” said Bernard Minster, one of the Melba Alliance members. “We just want to make it better, so it doesn’t affect our neighborhood as much.”

Later Wednesday, the council voted 5-0 to grant a one-year extension of the permit sought by Western National Group, the developers of the proposed 199-unit Clark Avenue Apartments project. A city report produced for that item declared that the company has been “seriously pursuing the project,” but needed the extension because neither the grading permit nor the building permit had yet been issued and city permit approvals had expired.

A new state law, which takes effect in January, would have granted that time extension anyway, regardless of what the council did now, Lyndes noted in making the motion to approve the time extension. This is the second time the council has heard an appeal of Clark Avenue project-related decisions. In September 2022, the council rejected an appeal filed by project opponents, who sought to overturn a decision by the City Planning Commission to approve the development permits. The apartment project is proposed to go on land just east of Interstate 5 in the 600 block of Clark Avenue.