"I have been involved in discussions on rehabilitating Seaside Lagoon since 2006," Mayor Jim Light said after the September 15 City Council meeting. "Now after 20 years we have a defined solution and the funding to get it done."
If you scrolled past coverage of that meeting last week, you probably saw a different headline: wave pool proposal rejected. That framing isn't wrong, exactly, but it buries the part of the story that actually explains why this project might finally move after two decades of stalling. The council didn't choose between two visions for Seaside Lagoon on September 15. It chose to stop letting new visions interrupt the one that already had money attached to it. That distinction is the whole story.
What the Council Actually Approved
The vote itself was narrow and procedural. Council directed staff to complete and submit a Coastal Development Permit application, along with an environmental exemption, for the rehabilitation project at 200 Portofino Way, where the lagoon has sat inside King Harbor since 1966. The vote was unanimous. It does not approve final construction drawings. It does not authorize a wave pool, a private lease, or any commercial development on the site. What it does is keep a state-funded, city-matched rehabilitation plan moving toward the California Coastal Commission, which holds permitting authority over the tidelands the lagoon sits on regardless of what the city council wants to build there.
Light was explicit about that limit in a Facebook post before the meeting: the city cannot sole-source a concession for a wave pool at Seaside Lagoon Park, because any such project would have to be competitively bid, and the Coastal Commission has not delegated its jurisdiction over the site to Redondo Beach. The most the council could do that night was authorize an application. It did.
The Pitch That Looked Sudden Wasn't
Most coverage described the wave pool concept, a proposal from BeachLife Festival co-founder Allen Sanford called Ocean Park, as an unsolicited idea that surfaced out of nowhere at an August 25 Harbor Commission meeting. That's technically accurate. It's also incomplete.
Public council agendas show a series of closed-session real estate discussions between the city, Sanford, and BeachLife Festival concerning portions of the Redondo Beach Marina parking lot and Seaside Lagoon itself, going back to January and recurring in February, April, and June, then again on September 1 and September 8, just before the public vote. Those sessions were logged only as "price and terms," and city officials say they predate and are separate from the current wave-pool debate. Maybe so. But if you're a resident trying to understand whether a private development idea for public parkland appeared from nowhere or had been quietly on the table all year, the agenda record says the latter is closer to true. The wave pool's public debut in August wasn't the start of the conversation. It was the moment a private conversation the city had already been having became visible.
That matters for anyone who wants to follow what happens next, because the same private conversations that predate August could easily resume after September, on a separate track from the Coastal Commission process the council just set in motion.
Two Systems, Two Sets of Numbers
Part of why this project has dragged for twenty years is that the lagoon's basic mechanics have gotten more expensive to run every year it sits unrepaired. The current facility pulls seawater from about 50 feet deep on the far side of the breakwater, chlorinates it for swimming, then dechlorinates it before discharging it back into the harbor. It's a flow-through system, and it's the reason costs and violations keep climbing as water-quality standards tighten around an aging design.
| Today's Lagoon | Phase 1 Rehab Design | |
|---|---|---|
| Water volume | Approximately 1.5 million gallons | Approximately 770,000 gallons circulating |
| System type | Ocean flow-through: chlorinated on intake, dechlorinated on discharge | Closed loop: continuously filtered and recirculated |
| Turnover | Roughly 200,000 gallons per hour flow-through | Full volume turns over about every 4.3 hours |
| 2026 season | Open 104 days, over 67,000 admissions, nearly $780,000 in gate and rental fees | Not yet built |
| Recent cost pressure | About $175,000 in water-quality fines over the last two-year cycle; a 2025 pump failure closed the lagoon two weeks and cost roughly $60,000 to fix | Closed-loop design is meant to reduce both categories going forward |
The replacement design roughly halves the water volume city records list for the current facility. That's not a downgrade so much as a different bet: a smaller, self-contained system that doesn't depend on continuously treating and discharging ocean water is cheaper to run and easier to keep in compliance. Whether it feels smaller to a family standing in it next to the memory of the old lagoon is a fair question nobody will be able to answer until it's built.
The money behind Phase 1: a $10 million state grant plus a $1 million city commitment, against an April cost estimate of about $9.47 million for the reduced first phase. That leaves a real but thin margin. Compare that to what the lagoon actually generates: almost $780,000 in a 104-day season this year. Gate revenue alone was never going to fund a rebuild. The state grant is the reason this project has a shot at happening at all, which is also the clearest argument for why the council chose not to pause it for an idea that, however popular with some residents, doesn't yet have committed funding of its own.
Why the City's Own Commission Said Wait
Here's the part that got the least attention. The Harbor Commission, at that same August 25 meeting, unanimously recommended that the council not proceed with the design as presented. Commissioners wanted the city to revisit a deeper lagoon, retained saltwater rather than a fully closed system, a sand bottom, more year-round amenities, an accounting for sea-level rise, and additional time to work with the state on funding flexibility.
That's a technically serious set of concerns from the city's own advisory body, and the council heard it and moved forward anyway. The recommendation was advisory, not binding, and council members apparently decided that twenty years of delay was itself the bigger risk to weigh against the possibility of a better design. Redondo Beach resident Ryan Harris, who described himself as having researched wave pools around the country for years, put the emotional case for waiting plainly at the meeting: "it kind of crushes my soul that space is only open three months out of the year." Resident Jennifer Jones argued the opposite, that the Phase 1 plan already delivers what years of public workshops asked for and that halting it to explore private concepts was, in her words, unfair to local families. The council sided with Jones's instinct on timing, even while leaving the door open, procedurally, to future private proposals through a separate and fully public process.
What Changes This Summer, and What Doesn't
If you're planning next year around this news, the practical answer is: nothing changes immediately. The lagoon already closed for its 2026 season on Labor Day weekend, and this vote doesn't reopen it early or extend next year's schedule. The next milestone is the Coastal Commission's review of the permit application, a process with no announced timeline, followed by construction plans, bidding, and eventually a build. Council members were clear that any significant design changes, whether from Coastal Commission feedback or a future private proposal, would come back to them for another public vote before anything gets built.
For now, Seaside Lagoon remains what it has been for South Bay families for generations: a $10 daily entry, heated saltwater alternative to the open Pacific, ten picnic areas, a private luau shelter, and a three-acre patch of King Harbor that, this year, drew more than 67,000 people through its gates in just over three months. The rehabilitation that's finally moving forward is designed to make that same experience more durable, not to change what it feels like to spend a July afternoon there. Whether Redondo residents get a slightly smaller, better-engineered version of the lagoon they grew up with, or a very different waterfront in a few years if the private conversations that have been running quietly since January eventually surface into a formal proposal, is still an open question. What isn't open anymore is whether the funded plan gets a shot. As of September 15, it does.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property near King Harbor, or you just want a local read on how Redondo's waterfront projects tend to move from vote to reality, John Morgenstern has been tracking this stretch of the South Bay closely and is glad to talk through what you're seeing.
