The thick, grassy greenbelt at Coyote Village in La Habra may not seem like much, but to residents who have suffered a homeowner’s nightmare for the past seven years, the turf marks the renewal of their community.
Two dramatic rain-soaked collapses of the condominium complex’s old greenbelt—first in 2019 and again in 2023—left a private flood channel below it exposed, one few even knew existed.
“I never thought this day would come,” said Rose Lujan, a resident since 1997 and a Coyote Village Homeowners Assn. board member. “I didn’t know how we were going to get it fixed.”
In addition to the chasm that ran between two rows of housing being an eyesore for residents like Lujan, it also posed a political conundrum.
Since the channel was privately constructed, but connected to the county’s public flood control system, a contentious question arose over who was responsible for fixing it. La Habra argued that the homeowners association was on the hook for repairs. The HOA protested that it could not shoulder the multi-million dollar costs and filed a lawsuit against the city, the county of Orange and and the Orange County Flood Control District in 2020.
The path to greener pastures came about when then-state Sen. Josh Newman secured $8.5-million in state funding from the 2022 budget to repair the wreckage. The restoration project broke ground in August of last year and construction got underway earlier this year.
Newman, members of the La Habra City Council and Don Hasch, who serves as the president of the HOA, gathered at Coyote Village on Wednesday for a ribbon-cutting to celebrate the project’s completion.
“There’s no better example of how communities and different levels of government should work together,” Newman said. “These are precisely the problems that we need to solve. The HOA couldn’t solve it on their own.”
The exposed flood channel in 2023 as it bifurcated the Coyote Village condo complex.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Once it was able to use the state funding, the HOA board oversaw a competitive bid process and awarded contracts to Willdan and Mike Bubalo Construction Co. for repair work.
In August, construction crews began repairing the channel with a reinforced concrete box and continued the work all through the rainy season.
“We designed this a lot stronger than it needs to be,” said Brian Rickey, Bubalo Construction’s project manager. “We designed it for the worst-case scenario, not only to handle the amount of flow that goes through [the channel] but also the loading on top of it.”
A heavy rainstorm in mid-September provided an impromptu stress test, which saw the construction work hold up as expected.
The previous collapses also damaged two amenities on the property — a pool and a tennis court. Both have been repaired. The HOA is covering the costs of replastering the pool and added drought-resistant landscaping to replace the muddy construction site a section of the complex had become.
And then, there’s the greenbelt.
“People are taking their pets for walks,” Lujan said. “Kids are coming over from the other side to play in the grass. We will definitely make use of it.”
La Habra Mayor Jose Medrano thanked city staff and all partners that helped bring the greenbelt back.
“It really is heartwarming, especially at this time of year, that you’re able to do a ribbon-cutting and to put this behind you,” he said to the community.
The new “unity bridge” symbolizes the end of the flood channel chasm that separated neighbors from each other for years.
(James Carbone)
City officials, Hasch and Newman posed for a photo before cutting through yellow caution tape to mark the end of the project.
Hasch looks forward to getting back to bread-and-butter HOA issues like the stucco repairs already underway.
But some tape on the property site remains.
Halfway through the greenbelt, a wood bridge between a decomposed granite path remains wrapped in caution tape while the path dries out.
Hasch sees the bridge as a symbol of the residents’ triumph over the chasm that literally split the community for so many years.
“It’s the perfect symbol of bringing us back together,” he said. “It took everybody to get to this moment. It took a village — a Coyote Village.”