The potshots and sniping have subsided for now, but Langley’s lengthy battle of the bluff will resume in earnest early next month.

The ongoing review of the controversial Langley Passage housing project will restart after a five-week delay on July 14. And since the city’s Planning Advisory Board began hearings on the proposal for the 20-home subdivision in March, the battle lines have become increasingly clear between opponents of the development and city officials who have recommended that the project be approved.

Local developer Gary Roth and Whidbey Neighborhood Partners are seeking city approval to build Langley Passage, a new neighborhood on the northeastern end of town. The project would include 20 single-family homes on a

8.52-acre property between Edgecliff Drive and Sandy Point Road.

Langley residents and others, however, have been fighting additional development in the Edgecliff area for more than five years. Concern about the construction of more homes in the neighborhood — and worries that additional stormwater runoff from new roofs and driveways will further threaten the stability of the crumbling bluff along Saratoga Passage — led to Langley’s first-ever moratorium in December 2005.

The ban on new subdivisions was lifted in February 2006, and a week after the moratorium ended, representatives of Whidbey Neighborhood Partners began meeting with city staff to talk about their housing project.

The project has been plodding along ever since. Multiple scientific studies of the new subdivision’s possible impact on water flow, above ground and beneath, were conducted in 2007, 2008 and 2009, and Langley officials completed their environmental assessment of the housing project in

March 2009.

Town officials have imposed an extensive set of development conditions on the project, and have said it would pose no additional danger to the bluff nearby. The city’s planning department has told the Planning Advisory Board the project fits with Langley’s zoning and building rules, and should be approved.

Critics, however, have challenged the city’s environmental review. The Whidbey Environmental Action Network and the Langley Critical Area Alliance, a group of Edgecliff residents and others opposed to the project, filed appeals against the city in May 2009.

Both WEAN and the alliance say the city bungled its review. Opponents claim that the changes suggested by the city to avoid impacts from the development don’t go far enough, and that more studies are needed to make sure the bluff is not endangered.

WEAN and the alliance have asked Langley to prepare an “environmental impact statement,” or EIS, on the project. Additional study is needed to make sure the drainage ditch along Edgecliff Drive can handle more stormwater after the project is built, opponents say, and the stability of the bluff and the placement of a water line through the wetlands on the Langley Passage property should also be scrutinized.

Critics charge that there is “substantial scientific doubt” that the housing project won’t hurt the environment, and say the extra requirements imposed by the city to handle drainage problems are “grossly inadequate.”

The Langley Critical Areas Alliance has suggested its own set of additional requirements for the project. Those include reforesting efforts on parts of the property that aren’t developed, and looking for other places to run a water line that will serve the development but also loop through to the Edgecliff neighborhood.

A new location for a water line would mean asking other property owners for easements, alliance officials said, and using the power of eminent domain to get land for the water line if nearby landowners are unwilling to grant easements.

Larry Cort, Langley’s planning chief, has defended the city’s environmental review of the project.

The city has noted that the developer is installing numerous rain gardens on the property to catch stormwater runoff, and the city’s independent experts have said the development will not weaken the bluff, and more studies are not needed.

Cort said the city will require an extensive monitoring effort to make sure water coming from the development doesn’t damage other properties in the area.

If the drainage system needs improvement, the developer will pay for it, even if it is outside city limits. The city asked for a $127,000 bond to pay for downstream improvements, and the developers recently increased the amount to $250,000.

“We felt it was appropriate to increase the size of the bond to include a potential upgrade of the county’s system,” Cort said.

The $250,000 bond, according to the city, could pay for the installation of a “tightline” to carry runoff past the bluff directly to the beach — something suggested earlier by opponents of the project.

The bluff along Saratoga Passage has long been considered unstable, and landslides have been commonplace in the past. A review of the area by the U.S. Geological Survey noted that the main danger to the bluff isn’t coming from water at the top of the bluff, but from the sea below. The beach below Edgecliff is underwater during high tides, and U.S. Geological Survey officials said the bluff is “exposed to frequent wave attack. The tides and wind-driven surface waves, though small, actively erode the toe of the bluff.”

So far, city planners have proposed three dozen additional requirements the developer of Langley Passage needs to meet to gain the city council’s approval, from retaining trees onsite to design details on rain gardens. The city has also imposed more conditions on the development of Langley Passage than the city placed on the Highlands, the largest housing project in city history, when that 53-home project was approved in 2006.

The Planning Advisory Board will make a dual recommendation to the city council after the hearing concludes next month. That will include a recommendation on the preliminary plat for the project, and also the board’s view on the appeals to the city’s environmental review of the project.

If the city requires that an EIS be completed for Langley Passage, it will be the first time in Langley’s history that such a study has been done for a development project, said Jack Lynch, the city’s planner through most of the 1980s and ’90s.

Neil Colburn, who was mayor when the project was first proposed, said he doubted the fight over the project would end if it eventually gains approval from the council.

He said he expected opponents to challenge the project in court.

“If this ends up in litigation, then it’s not going to be just the city against the people who don’t want to see the development,” he added. “They’re essentially suing everybody else that lives in the city when they sue.”

Colburn, who noted that he was one of the first environmentally minded candidates voted into office in Island County nearly 20 years ago, said the developer has jumped through all the hoops raised by the city.

“I just think there has been a lot of misinformation and hysteria about this project,” Colburn said.

“I hope that the project goes in, and I hope that Edgecliff gets sewered,” he said.