In the continuing effort to balance community needs with preserving nature, two decades ago Malibu Little League parents had to put up a fierce battle of their own.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
The season opener for the Malibu Little League last month looked to be another example of that most American of pastimes-innocent, all ?round fun, just like every season opener since 1955.
But the Little League once was the firestorm center of a controversy that pitted neighbor against neighbor, parochial passions against the state and legal teams in a two-and-a-half year court battle.
Malibu’s 27 miles of spectacular coastal views are now fiercely protected by a politically correct, enviro-army dedicated to preserving wild open spaces. But in the early ’70s, Little League baseball moms and dads took on the tree-huggers.
In 1969, the Malibu Little League began using what is now Malibu Lagoon State Beach for its playing fields. With the natural flood plains filled in, baseball diamonds were an easy fit and soon youngsters were racing for pop flies.
Thirty-odd years ago, the delicate ecosystem of Malibu Lagoon had been obliterated, the victim of years of dumping of fill material by Caltrans as Pacific Coast Highway was improved and Malibu development changed. The once-rural ranching village became a community of year-round residents and businesses.
That was when Malibu resident Carol Moss brought Huey Johnson to town.
Johnson was an early environmental advocate whose efforts helped to preserve California’s natural habitat. But Moss was impressed with then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s appointment of Johnson as state Secretary of Resources.
“Huey always had a long-term vision of how to protect our natural resources,” Moss said. “By the mid-70s, I could see that Southern California was having serious environmental problems and Sacramento wasn’t interested in us. Huey came down and looked around, and soon he drafted a proposal for a general development plan for Malibu Lagoon.”
By 1976, the California Department of Parks and Recreation had devised a plan to remove the fields, evict the Little League and begin restoring Malibu Lagoon to its natural state. The problem is that no one told the Little League.
“It was probably in ’77 or ’78 and I was practicing with my All-Star team down at the lagoon site,” Douglas O’Brien, longtime former Malibu Little League coach, said. ?Bulldozers just showed up and told us we had to leave. This was news to us. I called the league president and she called a lawyer who showed up in about an hour with a stop work order.”
Brentwood attorney Joel Castro took the case in a nearly three-year odyssey that revealed outraged sports fans living next to anxious environmentalists.
Giles Welch, a longtime resident of Point Dume and a green activist with Moss, said it was a battle royal to convince locals to move the baseball fields.
“I still have the arrows in my chest over that fight,” Welch said.
The Bluffs Park area was a likely alternative to house ball fields, but the state wanted to develop the land for an RV park.
Ann Fakehany, who worked in Castro’s law offices, said the problem was dispensation.
“Joel had to go to Sacramento and lobby the Legislature,” she said. “Eventually he got a bill passed allowing public lands to be used by private entities, like the Little League.”
The California Coastal Commission also weighed in. The league demanded to be relocated. Environmentalists were wary.
“There are a bunch of environmental wackos here in Malibu,” O’Brien said.
Eventually, a settlement was reached to offer the league 16 acres at Bluffs Park, with promises to preserve the surrounding acreage. O’Brien said local baseball aficionados all chipped in to develop the new fields.
“We built the whole park with $30,000 and volunteer labor,” O’Brien said. “Danny Klein donated the backstops and we bought gas for Chris Mellon’s bulldozers.”
The victory, however, was not to be a lasting one. The deal stipulated that the league could use the Bluffs Park land for 20 years only, and in 2002 the League was again challenged by the state to move. The City of Malibu stepped in and in 2005 negotiated a complicated deal involving the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy that allowed the city to purchase 10 acres of Bluffs Park land for its athletic fields.
In the end, the man whose plan resulted in the league being evicted from the lagoon site, ended up being responsible for creating the organization that helped the city keep its league viable. Johnson, in the ’80s, had been president of The Nature Conservancy, a grassroots organization that works to purchase land for preserving as wild open spaces, before leaving to found the Trust for Public Land. He immediately saw the need for establishing a conservancy for Malibu’s mountain ranges, and helped draft the plan to establish the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.
“We’re probably seeing our last chance to establish open spaces to preserve quality of life,” Johnson. “I learned in working with The Nature Conservancy that you can get a circle of caring, intense people to accomplish anything, with enough lobbying efforts, support and group organization.”
Johnson likens resource protection to a public/private trust. He said that, despite the Wilderness Act that protected nine million acres of federal land and was signed into law by President Johnson in 1964, organizations like his Resource Renewal Institute and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy are vitally necessary to protect the nation’s open spaces from being eaten up by urban sprawl.
“I expect that we’ll be fighting these same battles for the next 200 years,” Johnson said. “Nothing’s ever saved or won forever. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a matter of legislators responding to public perception and that perception is that our open spaces must be preserved.”