City’s assistant attorney says court action would fail, and the city must proceed with planning for the update to Malibu’s housing element plan.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
Residents unhappy with the City of Malibu’s pending update to its housing element plan urged the city to challenge the state in court at a special meeting of the Malibu Planning Commission Wednesday last week.
City staff is preparing to rezone eight parcels to accommodate 441 units of low- and moderate-income housing. California cities are required to submit plans to the state every eight years to accommodate a certain amount of housing for low- and moderate-income residents.
The City of Malibu has never submitted a housing element to the state, despite being required to do so. City staff have warned that the city must submit an update to the state by October 2013 or risk having the state take control of its planning department as punishment for noncompliance.
However, the figure of 441 units, including 188 low- and very low-income housing units, was based on population estimates by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), which city staff has acknowledged are inaccurate.
In the previous planning cycle, from 1998 to 2006, Malibu was assigned to plan for only 14 new housing units. Yet, in the most recent planning cycle, from 2006 to 2014, that number jumped to 441, despite results from the 2010 U.S. Census that shows Malibu grew by only 70 people from the year 2000 to 2010.
John Douglas, a consultant hired by the city to shepherd it through the housing element update process, said SCAG has not revealed its methods for quantifying how many new units cities must accommodate.
Joyce Parker-Bozylinski, head of the city’s planning department, said city staff believed SCAG had mistakenly included employees for Pepperdine University, which is outside the city limits, in its estimates. Parker-Bozylinski said the city wrote a letter to SCAG listing the errors in its calculations, but had received no reply.
Many residents have expressed fear that rezoning parcels for high-density development of 20 units per acre could alter Malibu’s rural character. They said the SCAG estimates were unfair, and urged the city to consider litigation challenging the figures.
“The city needs to challenge the number [of 441 units],” Lucille Keller, of the Malibu Township Council, said.
However, Assistant City Attorney Greg Kovacevich said the only city to mount a legal challenge to SCAG estimates, Irvine, had failed.
“It’s beyond a challenge in court at this point,” Kovacevich said. “The numbers cannot be challenged in court … Only an administrative remedy is available, and it’s too late for that.”
Planning Commissioner John Mazza asked Kovacevich why should the city submit a housing element plan, noting that only half of nearby cities have a certified housing plan.
“Proceeding without a certified housing element is very, very risky,” Kovacevich replied. “And that’s what you should be focused on, that’s the fact.”
The city is currently preparing a draft environmental impact report of eight properties selected last year as potential sites for rezoning to accommodate the low- and moderate-income housing. That report is expected to be available to the public for review in November. The list originally included nine properties, but City Attorney Christi Hogin indicated in June that staff would remove the 35-acre Trancas Field from the list following opposition from nearby residents.