Editorial/By Arnold G. York
We tromped down to the California Coastal Commission (CCC) hearing near the airport last Thursday to find out what it had in store for Malibu. The state Legislature had decreed the Coastal Commission was to provide a Land Use Plan (LUP) for Malibu, and we went to hear it and to put in our two cents. We could have saved ourselves the trip.
After a 12-hour Coastal Commission hearing, and after most of the audience had gone home, the commission voted to take some sort of action.
The problem is that even seasoned Coastal Commission watchers, who stuck it out to the bitter end, were uncertain as to exactly what action the commissioners had taken and what they meant by it. It’s only after talking to a bunch of people that it begins to make any sense.
What the CCC decided to do really was not much, but what they meant by it was a great deal.
The commission decided that Coastal Commission staff would came back to later meetings with findings consistent with the initial draft the commissioners had in front of them-the draft the city and citizens of Malibu found so wanting. So, officially, nothing is final and there is nothing to take to court.
What they didn’t do in the course of this last hearing was to consider making any major changes in the initial draft. Without saying it in so many words, their message to Malibu was quite clear: “Take it and stick it … we’re calling the shots on this and there is not much of anything you can do about it.” In fact, Sara Wan, chair of the Coastal Commission, made it a point to propose even further expansion of one of the hot button areas, the question of environmentally sensitive habitat areas (ESHAs), which, I suspect, was calculated to inflame us even further.
The process was also very telling. The auditorium where the hearing took place was packed, particularly with large numbers of Little League and AYSO children and parents who had come to ask the Coastal Commission not to take away Bluffs Park. Many of them lined up to speak.
The response of several of the commission members was just simply rude. They rolled their eyes, made faces, sighed loudly and, with a definite “we don’t suffer fools gladly” look and body posture, told the children the city and their parents were misleading them.
It was blatantly obvious this battle was very personal to some of them. They took our appearances and objections as a personal insult and some went to great pains to point it out. By comparison, some of Malibu’s environmental radicals were generally far more civilized and absolutely genteel.
So what does it all mean?
When I talk about the Coastal Commission, it should be realized there are 12 commissioners, four appointed by Gov. Gray Davis, four by former Speaker of the Assembly Bob Hertzberg and four by President Pro Tem of the Senate John Burton.
What I said earlier applies to four or five commissioners only. The remainder tried hard to listen well and were polite and respectful, even when it was obvious they disagreed with some of what Malibu citizens and officials were saying. The most difficult part for some of them, I suspect, is that Executive Director Peter Douglas, with the concurrence of the chair, blatantly attempted to manipulate the hell out of the process, dispensing and withholding information as it served his tactical needs.
If nothing changes in the next few months, the initial draft of the Malibu LUP will become the final draft, and for Malibu it will be a disaster. For one thing, it puts most of Malibu into an ESHA, or an ESHA buffer, or an area adjacent to an ESHA. It’s based on some very unproven and possibly junk science and is definitely headed for court.
The present draft LUP creates ESHAs willy nilly, protecting view sheds, controls where and how you live, dictates what you can do to protect your home against nature’s storms and turns many of our homes, which are now legal and conforming, to legal and nonconforming. It attempts to extract money wherever it can and tries to tiptoe around a couple of Supreme Court decisions the commissioners don’t like. In effect, it means we, as a city, will exist at the sufferance of the California Coastal Commission. They are all appointed people or staff bureaucrats answerable to no one but themselves and so frighteningly inbred, kind of like an old hillbilly mountain community, with all of the obvious problems you get with that level of inbreeding.
So what happens next?
The entire package comes back in July or so and at that time, or soon after but before the September legislative deadline, the package is going to be rammed down our throats. The worst part of it is that once the Coastal Commission passes it, it will expect the City of Malibu, which is having this foisted upon it, to docilely go about enforcing the LUP, which, to my mind, is sheer fantasy. This plan is the city lawyer’s full employment act for the next decade.
But, there is a way out.
I believe Malibu could negotiate until doomsday with the Coastal Commission and, I fear, it will get nowhere. It’s not that some of the commissioners don’t want to change the LUP and work out one we can live with, which would make sense. It’s that they don’t have enough votes. The radical environmental faction-led by Wan and including Pedro Nava (who sees racists under every seat) and commissioners Christina Desser, Patricia McCoy, and Shirley Dettloff-have a core group that will gleefully lock step vote on this to Malibu’s everlasting detriment.
The answer is that every citizen of Malibu, Democrat or Republican, should let the governor and new Speaker Herb Wesson know that if AB988 was intended to end a stalemate, what it has done instead is start a war.
No one can win this war, and extremism in the defense of the coast can only end up destroying what it seeks to protect. There needs to be some changes in the makeup of the Coastal Commission, so you’ve got to let higher officials know. They do listen to protests and if they don’t, there are others who will.