Now that the Court of Appeal has rejected Malibu’s doomed challenge to the Local Coastal Program, it is time to recognize the inevitable and end the legal challenges. Malibu is obligated to start following the current LCP, as drafted for us under the state law that addressed this city’s miserable failure to do what every other coastal municipality had accomplished over 20 years. The City has made the suicidal argument over and over again that we are somehow a special case, and that a local election can somehow overturn state law. Any 11th-grade government student who paid attention in class should see the fallacy of that. Spending more money on lawyers to further that fantasy would be criminal. Instead, our City Council must use every resource to hire the extra help for plan checks, inspectors and whatever else it will take to process the hundreds of lawful building permit requests from our neighbors that are backed up in the pipeline. We’ve had our days in court-at huge expense to the city and the delayed homeowners-and we lost. The Coastal Commission’s LCP may have some flaws-which the city can go back and seek amendments to correct. But every other city on the state can somehow live with this, and it certainly isn’t worth the cost or the delay to drag the inevitable out one more day.
Hans Laetz