Sunset Beach is now officially part of Huntington Beach, a spokesman for a county commission said Monday.
Benjamin Legbandt, a policy analyst for the Orange County Local Agency Formation Commission, said his group had filed paperwork with the county earlier in the day. The state will have to approve the paperwork as well, but Legbandt called that an administrative formality and said the annexation can be considered complete.
“We’ll probably send the notification to the affected agencies tomorrow,” he said.
Orange County Superior Court Judge Frederick P. Horn ruled Thursday against the Citizen’s Assn. of Sunset Beach’s petition to block the annexation until Sunset residents could vote on paying the same taxes as the rest of Huntington. Horn declared that Sunset met the criteria for an island annexation and that the taxes Sunset residents would pay after the move did not count as new taxes because they were already established in the city.
Attorneys for the city, the association and LAFCO met in court Aug. 11. The association argued that the annexation was unconstitutional because it would result in Sunset residents paying new taxes without consent, while the city and LAFCO argued that taxes and annexation were different issues.




