A vote by county supervisors does not address stalled development due to fire department water flow requirements. The overhaul would cost $140 million.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a plan Tuesday by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to upgrade Waterworks District 29 and resolve what some have called a “de facto building moratorium” in Malibu.
The supervisors’ vote instructs the Los Angeles County of Public Works director to prepare a comprehensive, long-range capital improvement master plan that will meet current and future domestic and fire protection water demands for the district. It also requires the director to “actively seek a partnership with the City of Malibu and other appropriate stakeholders” during the planning stages for the project. The director must report back to the board by June 14 with an estimated time frame for the planning, and issue progress reports every 60 days to the board thereafter.
The board also instructed the county fire chief “to assist land owners in assessing the infrastructure requirements for a proposed development as early in the review process as possible.”
The cost of a comprehensive overhaul has been estimated at $140 million, part of which would be borne by ratepayers within Waterworks District 29, which includes Malibu and some areas of the community of Topanga.
The board’s action comes after frustrated landowners, local developers and Malibu City Council members sparred Monday night at Malibu City Hall with representatives of the Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACFD), county Board of Supervisors and Waterworks District 29 over the issue.
The LACFD last year began enforcing existing requirements that had been disregarded for years, allowing Malibu property owners to build despite strict water flow requirements, as long as they built onsite water tanks to fight fires. But the department did not inform landowners about the new enforcement measures, and a number of people who had acquired the other necessary permits to build were denied a final permit by the department. Instead, they have been asked to personally fund improvements to the overall waterworks system at a cost, in some cases, in excess of $1 million.
The landowners charged that it is unfair to ask them to pay for improvements to the entire system, and that the high fees have made their property essentially worthless. They do not have the money to pay for the improvements, and they cannot sell their property because the high fees ward off potential buyers.
County Assistant Fire Chief Roy Dull told The Malibu Times in December that the LACFD ran a cost-analysis that concluded that allowing mitigation was undermining the integrity of the water main system as a whole.
Explaining the department’s decision to enforce the water flow requirements to the letter of the law, Dull said at the Monday meeting, “We found that past practice was not consistent with the purpose and intent of the fire code.”
He continued that under the fire code, financial hardship on the part of property owners did not qualify as an alternative to meeting fire safety requirements.
At the root of the problem is the water district’s decrepit water system, almost all of which was built around 1960 or earlier. Mayor Pro Tem Laura Rosenthal leveled blame at water district head Mark Pestrella and county officials, saying that an upgrade to the system should have been done years ago.
“If a regular business was ever run the way water District 29 has been run it would be out of business,” Rosenthal told Pestrella. “And I know you’ve attempted to sell it a number of times and no one’s interested.”
“That’s not true,” Pestrella responded.
He continued, saying if it were a private business, “You wouldn’t buy a system that was antiquated to begin with, and that far behind.”
Pestrella said that while the county operates the water district, it depends on ratepayers to fund improvements, making it difficult to raise funds.
“In government, if we go for a rate increase, we have to ask our board and the public about that rate increase. And if we do a capital improvement project, we have to comply with Proposition 218 requirements to restrict those fees as well,” Pestrella said.
But Councilmember Lou La Monte noted that 93 percent of Malibu tax revenue goes to the state and county governments. Councilmember Pamela Conley Ulich called the situation “a taking.”
The sudden enforcement of the requirements has had a chilling effect on new construction in Malibu, and several of the developers who spoke said the requirements are causing serious harm to the local economy.
Some have suggested the City of Malibu has the legal power to grant building permits to get the stalled projects moving again, despite county fire department requirements for water flow.
But the motion approved by the Board of Supervisors and written by Yaroslavsky forcefully warned against that suggestion, and added the City of Malibu “should support the Fire Department and Waterworks District 29 in enforcing the legal requirements necessary to provide sufficient water supply to protect lives and property, especially in one of the most fire-prone regions of Los Angeles County,” casting further uncertainty over the status of the stalled projects in the short term.