Report: Fix mooring policies

Newport Beach needs to overhaul the way it manages its 1,200 moorings and how much it charges for them, the Orange County Grand Jury said in a report issued Thursday.

Harbor officials have been studying the issues raised in the report, and one likely outcome is that harbor-related fees will rise. But don’t expect the city to make major changes to the way mooring permits are transferred between owners, which gets the biggest ding in the report.

Most of the issues the report describes aren’t new. It discusses how the city charges less-than-fair-market rent for moorings, how offshore moorings have drifted from where they were originally placed, and how mooring permits are essentially sold for profit, which is illegal.

“I guess I could say I’ve heard that kind of stuff for 30 years,” said Mark Sites, a dredging contractor who worked on the city harbor commission’s mooring subcommittee. “There’s always somebody wanting to do something about those moorings.”

The subcommittee just wrapped up a two-year study of where moorings are today compared with where they were placed in 1941, and it is now looking at administration of moorings — namely how the permits change hands and what they cost.

Newport’s coast and harbor are state-owned tidelands that the city manages. Fees are charged for moorings, docks and other uses of submerged lands, and the money goes into a fund to improve tidelands.

Although it’s illegal to sell moorings, in Newport, mooring permit holders will commonly sell a boat and transfer the mooring it’s on to the buyer. This inflates the price of the boat, and sellers will even advertise the size of the mooring first, listing the boat almost as an afterthought.

As a result, a permit is rarely relinquished to the next person on the waiting list. According to the Orange County Sheriff’s Harbor Patrol, about 2,000 people are on the waiting list for city moorings in Newport Beach, with some requests dating to 1969.

“It essentially hasn’t moved” in years, said Chris Miller, supervisor of the city’s harbor resources department.

The Grand Jury report called for better public access to the moorings and tighter regulations to make sure the tidelands get any money they’re entitled to. But the report doesn’t suggest specific changes, and the city isn’t required to follow what the report says.

Changes are on the way, however. Newport Beach Assistant City Manager Dave Kiff said recommendations on an update to mooring fees and other issues likely will come to the City Council within six months.

They’ll probably include some way for the city to take a cut of now-private transactions such as mooring permit transfers and rental of residential docks, which also isn’t technically allowed. But city officials probably won’t try to stop those practices outright.

“When you start talking to the boaters, they’re very sensitive about this particular issue,” City Councilman Don Webb said. “It’s not that simple because these are long-time customs, and a lot of people feel that their property rights allow them to do that.”

A recent appraisal the city requested showed the market value to transfer a mooring permit is about $475 per foot of boat, Kiff said. For a 30-foot boat, that’s $14,250. More than that is often charged now, but the city doesn’t get any — the seller and a broker do.

Kiff and Sites agreed the Grand Jury report won’t shake the foundations of Newport Harbor, but it may accelerate the city’s consideration of changes.

Boaters may take a financial hit. The city’s appraisal also showed the city only charges $10 per foot per year for an on-shore mooring permit and $20 per foot per year for an off-shore permit — $300 or $600, respectively, for a 30-foot boat — but the fair market value is $7.25 per foot per month, or $2,610 a year for the same 30-foot boat.

But ultimately it’s the public tidelands that benefit because whatever money the city collects has to be spent on them — for dredging, for example.

“I would feel that if somebody’s profiting over a public right-of-way, the city should get a share of it if we can work out a fair way to do it,” Webb said.