This is a corrected letter from last week.
Although our City Council expresses weariness over the recurrence of questions about the fate of the 2000 LUP, with all due respect to Joan House and Christi Hogin, their comments made at the June 10 Council meeting requires that it be addressed again to try to get some misconceptions corrected.
At the last Council meeting, it was stated that the “dead on arrival” comment attributed to Coastal Commission staff member Gary Timm described the status of the 2000 LUP and was confirmed by him in a deposition.
That comment was made by Gary Timm at a meeting of the Architects and Engineers committee held on May 16, 2000, more than a week before the interim planning commissioner sent the 2000 draft LUP to the Coastal Commission. In addition, that comment actually referred to a list of General Plan Land Use policies sent to the Coastal Commission in October or November 1999 by the then planning director, Craig Ewing, not the 2000 draft LUP which the Coastal Commission staff hadn’t even seen at that time.
This is the correct record and history of what actually happened. Unfortunately, being correct does not solve or change the dilemma that the city is now in. The Coastal Commission will prepare the Malibu LCP and the implementation ordinances regardless of the spin being placed on past events. The imagined Draconian effects of it should not be blamed on anyone but the city councilmembers who chose to disband the Task Force and fire the consultant before their very costly 5-year long task was completed.
The fact still remains, as Steve Eurig commented at the June 10 council meeting, if the city had not killed the Coastal Commission staff review of the 2000 draft LUP, the City would now be completing the Malibu LCP with help from the CC staff instead of the other way around, and AB988 would not exist.
Efrom Fader