The Brief

The United Nations climate summit in Dubai promises no shortage of drama in its final days — in part because negotiations over whether or not to phase out global fossil fuel use appear to have collapsed. One major goal of this year’s conference, known as COP28, is a “global stocktake” documenting the world’s climate progress and next steps on climate action. But as of Monday, any reference to ending oil and gas use had disappeared from the draft text, leading to widespread anger among climate advocates. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore declared that the conference was “on the verge of complete failure.”

But the well-publicized debate over fossil fuels threatens to overshadow another major question dogging negotiations as the clock runs out: whether or not world leaders can agree on how to adapt their countries’ infrastructure to withstand global warming. As climate-driven disasters continue to make headlines around the world, the fate of millions in especially vulnerable regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia hinges on this question.

Though hundreds of international negotiators have spent the past fortnight tangling over a convoluted document that outlines how countries will adapt to climate change, they haven’t yet reached consensus on who exactly will pay for the phenomenally expensive undertaking — or even how to define successful climate adaptation in the first place. As the end of the conference approaches, stakeholders who spoke to Grist described the most recent draft text of the so-called global goal on adaptation as “watered-down,” “vague,” and “confusing.”

Get caught up on COP28

What is COP28? Every year, climate negotiators from around the world gather under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to assess countries’ progress toward reducing carbon emissions and limiting global temperature rise.

The 28th Conference of the Parties, or COP28, is taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, between November 30 and December 12 this year.

• Read more: The questions and controversies driving this year’s conference

What happens at COP?

Part trade show, part high-stakes negotiations, COPs are annual convenings where world leaders attempt to move the needle on climate change.

While activists up the ante with disruptive protests and industry leaders hash out deals on the sidelines, the most consequential outcomes of the conference will largely be negotiated behind closed doors. Over two weeks, delegates will pore over language describing countries’ commitments to reduce carbon emissions, jostling over the precise wording that all 194 countries can agree to.

What are the key issues at COP28 this year?

Global stocktake: The 2016 landmark Paris Agreement marked the first time countries united behind a goal to limit global temperature increase. The international treaty consists of 29 articles with numerous targets, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing financial flows to developing countries, and setting up a carbon market. For the first time since then, countries will conduct a “global stocktake” to measure how much progress they’ve made toward those goals at COP28 and where they’re lagging.

Fossil fuel phaseout or phasedown: Countries have agreed to reduce carbon emissions at previous COPs, but have not explicitly acknowledged the role of fossil fuels in causing the climate crisis until recently. This year, negotiators will be haggling over the exact phrasing that signals that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels. They may decide that countries need to phase down or phase out fossil fuels or come up with entirely new wording that conveys the need to ramp down fossil fuel use.

• Read more: ‘Phaseout’ or ‘phasedown’? Why UN climate negotiators obsess over language

Loss and damage: Last year, countries agreed to set up a historic fund to help developing nations deal with the so-called loss and damage that they are currently facing as a result of climate change. At COP28, countries will agree on a number of nitty-gritty details about the fund’s operations, including which country will host the fund, who will pay into it and withdraw from it, as well as the makeup of the fund’s board.

• Read more: The difficult negotiations over a loss and damage fund

The latest text is “much weakened,” said Pratishtha Singh, a policy analyst at the Canadian chapter of the Climate Action Network, an international advocacy organization. “It’s far from enough in terms of what’s needed by developing countries.”

The “global goal on adaptation” is a sweeping framework that is supposed to guide how the world prepares for floods, fires, droughts, and other climate disasters. It’s also one of the last and biggest puzzle pieces in the implementation of the landmark Paris Agreement. The 2015 accord had three main pillars: mitigating future climate change by reducing carbon emissions, adapting to future climate disasters, and redressing the loss and damage that can’t be prevented. In the years since it was signed, countries have set goals for cutting carbon emissions and, much more recently, committed hundreds of millions of dollars to a loss-and-damage fund, but they haven’t yet agreed on a framework for climate adaptation.

This year’s COP is the final deadline for putting that framework together, but talks have moved at a snail’s pace in Dubai as negotiators clash over key issues. Despite holding at least eight technical discussions on the adaptation goal earlier this year, negotiators failed to agree on a draft document by the end of the conference’s first week, a sign of dismal progress. A parallel discussion about how vulnerable countries should design their national adaptation plans also broke down, and negotiators have punted that debate to a meeting in Bonn, Germany, next summer.

The reasons for the logjam are multiple. For one, the geopolitics of adaptation finance are highly contentious. In the past, rich countries in Europe and North America have promised to support adaptation in more vulnerable countries, but they have overwhelmingly failed to meet their previous commitments — and even those commitments were hundreds of billions of dollars short of what experts agree is needed. Negotiators from Africa and Southeast Asia entered the adaptation talks at COP28 seeking an acknowledgment that wealthy nations need to do more, plus a mechanism for monitoring international aid, which they say will help ensure that rich countries don’t renege on their funding commitments. Rich countries, however, sought to restrict the final agreement to a discussion of how to develop and implement adaptation policy.

“The main issue is the financial part,” said Idy Niang, a Senegalese negotiator who represents a bloc of the world’s least economically developed countries, during the first week of COP28. “We are not satisfied with the proposal coming from developed countries.”

The most recent draft text includes a lengthy discussion of adaptation finance, including a call for rich countries to pay more and a vague nod to their past failures, but it doesn’t include any clear commitment from wealthy nations. Nor does it outline any mechanism for tracking and monitoring adaptation aid.

An earlier version included a provision that called for rich countries to provide at least $400 billion in adaptation finance per year by 2030, which would have represented a more than tenfold increase from recent years. But this line disappeared in later talks, as did any reference to equity principles underscoring developed countries’ responsibility to provide adaptation funding. Emilie Beauchamp, a climate policy expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Canada-based environmental think tank, said such an agreement was a nonstarter for many nations.

“It’s not possible,” she told Grist. “This is an absolute red line for the developed countries.” She called the outcome on finance “quite disappointing.”

A second sticking point in the talks is the question of how to define successful adaptation. Outlining clear targets for adaptation is highly technical and challenging. Unlike goals for mitigating climate change, which can be pegged to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or global temperature increase, adaptation responses vary depending on local conditions. There’s no universal yardstick that countries can use to compare their progress. Adaptation efforts on a small island, for instance, look very different compared to a large urban city.

“Climate finance is messy, but the global goal on adaptation is even messier,” said Katherine Browne, a researcher at the Stockholm Environmental Institute who studies adaptation. “The problems with finance are political, but the problems with the goal are technical, because they’re trying to find a way to measure something that basically everyone agrees can’t be measured.”

The final framework needs to lay out a system for gauging progress on disaster resilience, but the term “adaptation” is so broad that negotiators have struggled to reach consensus on what categories of adaptation to include, or about how to measure the value of any given infrastructure project. The most recent text contains seven targets to meet by 2030, including a group of core themes for adaptation projects. These include food and water security, disaster readiness, universal healthcare, and land conservation.

But these broad targets lack specificity and include language like “substantially” reducing poverty, “increasing” infrastructure resilience, and “reducing climate impacts on ecosystems.”

“The language is vague,” said Sandeep Chamling Rai, an adaptation expert with the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund. “Everything is there, but nothing is there.”

Given the unquantifiability inherent in the language, negotiators at COP28 are struggling to come up with a system allowing them to measure progress toward these goals. The best they’ve been able to do is punt the question to future COPs: Negotiators agreed to create a two-year working group that will sift through hundreds of potential adaptation “indicators” and try to create a global standard. These indicators might include the fatality rate for climate disasters, the percent of a population with access to clean water, or the number of acres of forested land in a country.

The fact that adaptation has stalled out even as other issues move forward is a grim sign for vulnerable countries, said Beauchamp of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

“If you look at the broader COP … you have the loss-and-damage issue, which is zooming,” she said. “Adaptation, there’s nothing. It’s basically saying that the world does not care about the lives and ecosystems of people who are on the front lines of the climate crisis.”

This is ironic, because the question of whether or not rich nations should help less fortunate countries with climate adaptation has never been that contentious on its own, compared to the jostling over emissions reductions and funding for loss and damage. Unlike the latter, which amounts to paying what are essentially climate reparations, adaptation finance is often seen as a natural extension of the sustainable development framework that guides many forms of international aid.

Negotiators have set up several adaptation funds at previous COPs. Some of them, like the “Least Developed Countries Fund” and the “Special Climate Change Fund,” have been around for more than 20 years. A group of developed countries including Canada and Norway agreed to replenish these bank accounts last week with a new contribution of $174 million.

The problem is that the total amount of money in all these funds isn’t even close to what poorer countries need, and spending has plateaued in recent years. Global adaptation needs are outpacing adaptation finance by as much as $366 billion per year, according to the latest U.N. data, and the need is only growing as the world continues to warm.

At the same time, rich countries such as the United States have failed to follow through on their prior pledges to fund adaptation: A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, found that international adaptation finance declined by around 15 percent between 2020 and 2021 — a time when it was supposed to be skyrocketing. Even global institutions like the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund only give out a few million dollars at a time for resilience projects. That’s enough to restore a small mangrove forest in Guinea-Bissau or build a wastewater treatment plant in Barbados, but not to armor a city against sea-level rise or help a country’s farming sector prepare for droughts.

Another reason for the lag in funding is that the private sector has little incentive to invest in adaptation projects. Many banks and investors have backed solar farms and carbon capture projects across the developing world, because these initiatives promise future financial returns when people buy electricity or trade carbon credits. The same can’t be said for sea walls, desalination plants, and coastal conservation areas, which is why adaptation makes up only a quarter of all international climate finance.

While the most recent draft text obliquely nods to the need for scaled-up private finance, climate advocates who spoke to Grist called this a red herring. Singh, of the Climate Action Network, said such language is “wild and unacceptable,” given both private funding’s insufficiency compared to government-scale financing and the potential for private ventures to saddle developing countries with burdensome debt.

The United States, meanwhile, is championing the private sector as an adaptation savior. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry unveiled a report last week arguing that adaptation is profitable for the private sector, because companies can make money by protecting their supply chains against disasters, for instance, or by investing in government adaptation projects.

“I think a ton of the incentives already exist, and I think the private sector is just awakening to those in a really significant way,” said Nathanial Matthews, the CEO of the Global Resilience Partnership, the coalition of governments and nonprofits that produced the report. He pointed to investors who issued loans to help build a flood-proof highway tunnel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and made money back through toll revenues.

But vulnerable countries can’t close the adaptation gap without significant public funding from wealthy nations, and that funding has yet to materialize.The next big test will arrive at next year’s COP29, where countries are hoping to ink a major new international funding agreement that will funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to adaptation.

“We’re debating all these things about adaptation, but there’s absolutely no obligation for countries to implement it and to take it on,” said Beauchamp. “This framework would give a clear signal that the world actually cares about adaptation, but at the moment, we’re putting that signal in the bin.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/international/cop28-dubai-climate-adaptation/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Saying he had concerns it could disenfranchise voters during the midterm election, a federal judge on Tuesday seemed skeptical of the Trump administration’s demands that California election officials set aside 20,000 ballots that it claimed could have been mailed to noncitizens.

“Some of these may be very valid voters, and that’s my concern about disenfranchisement,” said U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.

Carter said he would issue a formal ruling by Wednesday, but he told the courtroom he was likely going to appoint a special master to weigh the evidence both sides present at a hearing in two weeks. That means his final ruling might not come until after the election.

He said he didn’t want to “just wing it with a ruling” based on last-minute evidence the federal government submitted to the court the night before Tuesday’s hearing.

Carter also suggested that his ruling would order federal authorities to stop telling election officials that they could face criminal charges if they didn’t comply with the Trump administration’s demands. The Trump administration on Friday sent letters to California election officials telling them to set aside ballots from suspected noncitizens, and threatened them with criminal charges if they allowed those people to vote.

“This court believes it would be wise that any threats to state or county (election) employees cease immediately,” Carter told the courtroom.

Carter’s remarks point to yet another likely legal blow to the Trump administration as it seeks to validate President Donald Trump’s longstanding claims of widespread election fraud favoring Democrats. Experts and election officials say those claims are meritless.

Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, acknowledged that the government’s list of 20,000 people may contain citizens, but he said the possibility that noncitizens were voting illegally was too great a threat.

“I would ask the state how many illegal votes is OK for them?” Essayli said. “It cannot be that the state has a right to facilitate the counting and tabulation of noncitizen votes. There’s no right to that.”

The Trump administration sued California earlier this month saying election officials refused to comply with a 48-hour federal deadline to set aside the ballots of up to 20,000 people the administration had flagged as possible noncitizens until the voters’ citizenship could be verified.

The administration sought a temporary restraining order forcing the state to comply.

California officials argued there was no way they could since they were busy overseeing the election. They also called the demand an illegal effort to meddle in state-run elections that could disenfranchise legal voters.

“I just want to make sure the stakes are clear: that what we’re talking about is stripping voting rights from thousands of people until proven otherwise,” said Anne Bellows, a deputy attorney general with the California Department of Justice.

Judge points to immigrant arrests

State and county officials also have questioned the methodology the federal government used to flag possible noncitizens.

In a court filing, Los Angeles County officials said that a sampling of 200 names from the federal list, which included people from all over California, found that many of them were likely citizens and that most had not voted before and were not sent ballots. Federal investigators re-reviewed those 200 names and found that only four were citizens, Essayli told the judge.

“We stand by the reliability of the information,” he said. “We take our obligations and ethics very seriously.”

Carter noted that, last week, federal prosecutors charged 28 California green card holders for allegedly voting or registering to vote in violation of laws prohibiting noncitizens from participating in elections.

He said that if noncitizens really are voting in as large of numbers as the Trump administration claims, there’s nothing stopping federal prosecutors from finding them and charging them without the risk of blocking legal voters from having their ballots counted.

“If it’s this big, you’ve got a remedy for goodness sakes,” Carter told Essayli. “Go out and indict.”

After the hearing, Essayli said from the courthouse steps that the state could “resolve this today.”

“They just seem disinterested in getting to the bottom of this,” Essayli said, noting that the number of ballots in question could tip smaller elections. “A lot of elections are decided by tens of votes or hundreds of votes."

9th Circuit ruled against Trump

The hearing came a day after two judges on a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an emergency effort from the Trump administration to bypass Carter’s courtroom.

The Trump administration sought an emergency order from the appellate court, claiming that Carter didn’t schedule a hearing fast enough. The two judges said prosecutors’ arguments about urgency didn’t hold up.

Their ruling noted that the prosecutors have been making claims about illegal voters on California’s voter rolls since July and could have taken action any time since, so their “claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one.”

Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, noted in a concurring opinion that he had “serious doubts” about the federal government’s claims that prosecutors could “superintend or intervene in a state’s election administration.”

He wrote that Congress granted states — not the executive branch — authority over elections.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Patrick Bumatay, another Trump appointee, argued that “federal law precludes California from commingling ballots likely cast by aliens with legitimate ballots, because it encourages and induces illegal voting.”

“Stopping that practice for those identified as likely noncitizens is the bare minimum,” Bumatay wrote.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The Los Angeles City Council gave the L.A. Police Department the green light Tuesday to move forward with a pilot program to install new automated license plate recognition cameras in the city, despite concerns from council members and the public about privacy and surveillance.

The council voted 9-6 to veto the program, but fell short of the 10 votes required to nix the agreement and send it back to the Board of Police Commissioners.

Under the pilot program, security company Axon Enterprise will install cameras on some city streetlights for a three-month trial period, at no cost to the city.

The narrow vote divided the council, which debated at length whether L.A. should move forward with introducing more license plate readers on its streets without additional requirements on how the police use the data.

This summer, LAPD declined to renew its contract with Flock Safety for license plate readers after reports that law enforcement agencies including LAPD had shared Flock data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. Across California, the use of AI license plate readers has faced pushback from community members concerned about how the information is used.

The L.A. City Council voted 9 - 6 to veto the program and fell short of the ten votes required to nix the agreement.

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“I certainly understand the department's desire to bring on a new company to replace Flock, but in the neighborhoods that I represent, there still seems to be a lot of uncertainty about how this new technology will work,” said Councilmember Curren Price, who voted to veto the pilot program.

Council members who blocked the veto cited public safety concerns, saying there were other ways to require the police to increase transparency. Councilmember Traci Park said that outrage over the technology stemmed from misinformation.

Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, who also voted against rejecting the pilot program, said the council’s power to negotiate tighter regulations on how LAPD uses license plate reader data could come later on, after the three-month testing period.

“The point of leverage is going to come after the three months, he said. “That's when we're going to be faced with this question about ‘Do we expand this?’”

How we got here

The City Council weighing in on an LAPD pilot program is not the norm, and comes after months of heightened scrutiny over how the department utilizes automatic license plate reader data. The department primarily uses the technology in its vehicles rather than on city streets.

In July, the Office of the Inspector General for the L.A. Board of Police Commissioners issued a lengthy report on the status of the technology within LAPD, and recommended the department get approval for new contracts from the Board of Police Commissioners, a civilian body appointed by the mayor that determines policy for the department.

That’s what led the board to consider and approve the Axon pilot program in September. That opened up an opportunity for the L.A. City Council to intervene in the decision. Under the city charter, the council can veto actions by boards of commissioners with a two-thirds vote.

That’s what Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez was pushing for when he initiated the council vote. He said Tuesday that the vote was an opportunity to push the police department to commit to independent auditing of how it uses automated license plate reader data, establish board oversight of sharing data with external agencies and limit who in the department can access the data.

“We should take time to make sure that we have thorough, thoughtful protections laid out before we install more cameras,” Soto-Martinez said Tuesday.

The pilot program is just a small slice of LAPD’s business with Axon. The Board of Police Commissioners also recently approved a 10-year, $235 million contract with the company for body cameras, tasers and automated license plate recognition cameras for around 1,600 police vehicles.

That contract will require council approval and is currently being reviewed by the city administrative officer, according to the mayor’s office.

Record-breaking high tides rolled into Southern California waters for the second day in a row Tuesday.

The tide gauge in San Pedro read 8.18 feet Tuesday morning, its highest measurement since records began more than a century ago, after already setting a new record on Monday. The previous record of 7.93 feet was set in 2005.

Records were also broken at tide gauges in La Jolla and Santa Barbara.

High water levels spilled over seawalls and swept across beaches, inundating communities along L.A. and Orange County coasts that have been hit repeatedly by storm surges and destructive surf over the last few months.

“We've already seen impacts that we have not had in quite some time,” said Lisa Phillips, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service. 

The exceptionally high tides were expected to peak Tuesday and slowly subside as the week progresses. Coastal flood warnings are in effect up and down the coast until Thursday afternoon.

But scientists say the conditions are just a preview of what’s to come in the next few months with the highest astronomical tides of the year — and peak El Niño season — still on the horizon.

Coastal flooding

On the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach on Monday, water poured over the seawalls of some homes that back up to Newport Harbor, leaving up to a foot of flooding in some intersections.

At the corner of 39th Street and River Avenue, Diane Teitscheid waded ankle-deep, motioning for cars to slow down so as not to slosh the water into her and her neighbors’ garages.

“All the water on our entire street is coming from that house,” she said, pointing to a home where water rushed through the side gates.

The city urged residents to prepare for the high tides, knocking on doors and offering free sandbags at multiple locations. Some did not heed the warning.

“What we're finding is there's just some private residents that are choosing to do nothing,” said Joe Stapleton, the Newport Beach City Council member whose district includes the Balboa Peninsula. “And by doing nothing, they're intentionally flooding streets and neighbors' properties.”

Stapleton said the city is now planning to take “more of an enforcement approach,” which could include fines for people who refuse to bolster their seawalls with sandbags in flood-prone areas.

Several Newport Beach homes were inundated by seawater on Monday.

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Tide levels in some parts of Southern California set records Monday, when this photo was taken on Newport Beach's Balboa Peninsula, and again the following day.

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Flooding also prompted officials to shut down part of Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach.

Farther north, seawater inundated streets and homes on the Long Beach Peninsula, where a number of structures along the boardwalk have been rendered uninhabitable by recent storm surges from Hurricane Marie and Tropical Storm Rachel.

What’s pushing the tides over the top?

Tides are naturally high during this time of year because of the position of the moon and sun.

But at the moment, other factors are driving up sea levels and pushing astronomical tides even higher than they would normally be.

First, the ocean off the coast of Southern California is warmer than ever recorded — we’re nearly a year and a half into a prolonged marine heat wave. Since warmer water takes up more space than colder water, sea levels are higher. Water temperatures across the Central Coast and Southern California are 5 to 9 degrees above average.

Roads and homes near 38th Street Park on Newport Beach's Balboa Peninsula flooded Monday.

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Scientists say the warming is being driven by a combination of human-caused climate change and El Niño, a climate pattern in which the normally cooler eastern Pacific Ocean heats up.

Second, El Niño has pushed a Kelvin wave into Southern California waters. What’s a Kelvin wave? It’s essentially a huge mass of warm water moving across the ocean. When a Kelvin wave collides with a landmass, it can raise sea levels up to a foot.

University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain also said the current tidal conditions are just the beginning of even more severe high tides over the next several months. That means more flooding for coastal communities.

“We have not seen the worst coastal flooding this year that we're likely to see later,” Swain said. “This is probably, unfortunately for those who are dealing with it, just a preview of what is to come. The coastal flooding will be more widespread geographically and probably significantly deeper later this season.”

Swain said king tides — the term for tides at their yearly peak — have yet to arrive. Tides generally don’t reach their highest until late November, December and January.

On top of that, Southern California will likely see continued sea level rise from El Niño-driven Kelvin waves over the next few months. And this year’s potentially historic El Niño season is also likely to come with significant rain, potentially adding storm surge and surf.

Drive around Newport Beach this election season, and you’re likely to see lawn signs with an image of four giant concrete bunnies behind bars below the phrase “SAVE OUR PARK.” It’s a reference to the current City Council’s controversial idea of building a new police headquarters and jail on the parkland that surrounds the Newport Beach Civic Center, home to the famous, or infamous, “Bunnyhenge” sculpture.

The proposal, one of several the city is considering for a new police headquarters, wouldn’t actually lead to the sculpture’s demise, but the idea of paving over a significant portion of the open space and paths around the sculpture has emerged as a top issue in the city’s November City Council race. Other major issues include protecting the city’s vulnerable shoreline from El Niño and preventing the kind of chaos that engulfed the Balboa Peninsula on July 4, when looting, illegal fireworks and street brawls broke out, leading to hundreds of arrests.

Three seats on the seven-member council are contested (in a fourth seat, Robyn Grant, the incumbent has no challengers). Two challengers, Walter Stahr and Andy Gerken, entered the race in their respective districts specifically to fight against building a new police station in the park, which would include the city jail.

“I am 100% opposed to a jail in the park. That is my number one issue,” Stahr said at a candidate forum in September.

Walter Stahr, a candidate for Newport Beach Civic Council District 3, jumped into the race out of concern for the proposal to build a new police headquarters in Civic Center Park.

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At the same forum, Gerken said, “I imagined a police department there and the park gone, and I thought, ‘How could I not run?’ So I ran to save the park.”

The issue illustrates a classic Southern California debate, and one that gains increasing urgency as developable land grows ever more scarce — how valuable is open space?

Everyone agrees Newport PD needs new digs. But where? 

Newport’s current police headquarters, off Jamboree Road, is more than 50 years old. The force has outgrown the building, and it is plagued by maintenance problems. “It’s routine that we have sewage backup; we had the electrical fire last month, the power outage with the failure of the backup generator in November,” Dave Miner, the police chief, said at a city meeting in March. “We definitely do need a new building.”

Neither the City Council members nor the candidates running to unseat them dispute the need. The question is where.

A series of ad hoc committees has looked into several options:

• Rebuild the headquarters in its current spot
• Build on a city-owned site near John Wayne Airport, which was purchased years earlier with a potential police headquarters in mind
• Purchase private land for the new headquarters
• Convert a portion of Civic Center Park, right across from City Hall, which would mean razing some of the sculpture garden that includes Bunnyhenge
  

Concept designs show the police station taking up to one-quarter of the existing parkland on a slope that would put it right under the watchful gaze of the giant concrete rabbits of Bunnyhenge.

Earlier this year, when the majority of City Council members seemed to favor the park option, opponents sprang into action. Dozens of people showed up to a City Council meeting in March to speak against the idea, including Stahr. He is challenging incumbent Erik Weigand in District 3 along with another challenger, Tim Stoaks.

“Parks are sacred spaces,” Stahr said from the lectern at that meeting. “One does not destroy a park to make way for an office building, because, face it, that’s what the police station really is: it’s an office building and a parking structure and a huge gas station.”

Up to a quarter of Newport Beach Civic Center Park, and up to about half of the lower part of the park, could be razed to build a new police headquarters.

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Supporters say putting the new police station on city property makes financial sense and would consolidate the city’s main services at the Civic Center.

No decision has been made to build the new headquarters on the parkland. But the city has allocated at least $1.5 million dollars to evaluate the option.

Once maligned, Bunnyhenge hopped into locals’ hearts

The controversy over potentially putting a new police station in the park has echoes in Newport Beach history. In the early aughts, the city was desperate to replace its outgrown City Hall. One controversial option was to build it on part of the land, the same slender parcel at issue now, that residents had been promised as their own coastal version of a Central Park.

Residents put the idea on the ballot in 2008, and after a whopping $800,000 in spending for and against the measure (the equivalent of about $1.2 million today), voters approved the new Civic Center.

One of the walking paths that would likely have to be rerouted or eliminated if a new police headquarters is built in Civic Center Park.

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The park was developed along with the Civic Center, including the sculpture garden where Bunnyhenge sits. It also includes wetlands, walking paths through native coastal vegetation and a dog park.

The quirky installation of giant rabbits at the park has spawned love and ire over the years. Families take their holiday pictures with the concrete beasts, and they’ve become a destination for out-of-town visitors thanks, at least in part, to their inclusion in the popular Atlas Obscura travel guide.

But some, including former City Councilmember Scott Peotter, thought the bunnies were a waste of money. In a 2014 campaign video, Peotter criticized city officials for spending money on the installation. At the end of the video, Peotter walks away while one giant bunny’s heads spontaneously explodes. (It wasn’t real, and the bunnies still stand.)

Park lovers say a new police station would not only intrude on the sculptured bunnies’ territory, but the project would also eliminate walking paths, jeopardize the adjacent wetlands and reduce habitat for the real bunnies and other animals that live in the park.

What do the candidates say about building a police station in the park?

At a forum held in late September at the OASIS Senior Center, City Council candidates were asked which site is most appropriate for a future police station and why. The two challengers running on the issue, Stahr and Gerken, were unequivocal about where it should not be located.

“Definitely not the Civic Center Park,” Gerken said, adding that he would consider the police department’s preferences regarding the other options.

Stahr said, “I don't know the precise place it should be. The one thing I am absolutely morally convinced of is that it does not belong in the park.”

The other two challengers, Stoaks and Tina Babajanians, also said they opposed the idea.

In contrast, incumbents Weigand, Lauren Kleiman and Joe Stapleton didn’t rule out the possibility. “What I will agree with a lot of people in the community is this process has been flawed from the beginning,” Stapleton said, noting that he would have favored a “more public-facing committee” rather than the initial ad hoc committee, which had no public members.

Kleiman, who is facing a challenge from Gerken to represent District 6, said she supports building a new station “anywhere that is central and that allows the police to have continued operation … that would not impact safety in the city.” She said ideally the new HQ would get built where the current one sits, but doing so would be logistically challenging and disrupt police operations.

Weigand, who is facing a challenge from Stahr and Stoaks to represent District 3, said he was “OK with studying the Civic Center site … to figure out if it actually works.” If it turns out it's not feasible, he said, the city should look at nearby properties that would put the new HQ in “the heart of our city.”

After the candidate forum, resident Pamela Marks said her top issue is making sure the police station doesn’t get built in the park. But more than the idea itself, she said, she doesn’t think the current City Council has listened to residents’ concerns about the proposal. “I get that feeling when I go to the meetings. They kinda roll their eyes and, you know, they just blow it off,” she said.

Asked why preserving Civic Center Park is important to her, Marks said, “The park's important to me because open space is important to me.” She said she volunteers for the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in neighboring Huntington Beach. “I've released wildlife in that park because that's where it was found.”