The owners say their application, including a wastewater treatment facility, is complete. However, the regional water board says otherwise.
By Olivia Damavandi / Staff Writer
In its 10-year effort to build a shopping center on a parcel at the intersection of Civic Center Way and Cross Creek Road, Malibu La Paz Ranch, LLC last week filed an appeal against the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board’s decision deeming that its project application was incomplete.
The matter will be reviewed by the State Water Resources Control Board, which may dismiss the appeal or order the LARWQCB to reevaluate the application before taking further action. Regardless of its decision, the state board must finish its review within 270 days, although that deadline may be extended, SWRCB Public Information Officer Judy Panneton said Tuesday in an e-mail.
In November, Malibu City Council approved both an 112,000-square-foot and a 99,000-square-foot version of the La Paz project. Both plans include a collection of retail, restaurant and office buildings ranging in size from 6,000 square feet to 17,000 square feet. The larger option requires a coastal development permit and is pending approval by the California Coastal Commission, but the smaller one does not. (Environmental group Santa Monica Baykeeper filed a lawsuit against Malibu in December, challenging the city’s approval of the La Paz development for its “inadequate environmental impact report.”)
In the larger version, Malibu La Paz Ranch, LLC offers to donate 2.3 acres of the parcel and $500,000 to the City of Malibu for “any municipal purpose,” including a wastewater treatment plant.
City Manager Jim Thorsen on Tuesday called the La Paz project offer “a very important component of the project because it gives us a location to implement the wastewater treatment facility that the regional board has been seeking.
“Therefore, are we concerned about that issue? Yes,” Thorsen said. “We hope the regional board and the Coastal Commission move forward with the La Paz project.”
La Paz claims its project application is complete by law under the Permit Streamlining Act, which requires that development project applications be reviewed and their completeness determined within 30 days of submission. The appellant states it submitted the application and all required documentation on Dec 2, 2008, but did not receive any response from the LARWQCB until after Jan. 2 of this year.
Contrarily, the regional water board has deemed La Paz’s application incomplete. Though the application includes a conceptual Title 22 engineering report, which details the capabilities of its proposed wastewater treatment system, a final engineering report approved by both the LARWQCB and the Department of Public Health must be obtained, the board states.
La Paz Attorney Tamar Stein said the report of waste discharge would be deemed complete by law if the LARWQCB does not act on it by Aug. 31.
“I’m hesitant to talk about facts because the case is unusual,” Jeff Ogata, LARWQCB senior staff counsel said Monday in a telephone interview. “It’s a legal matter, but the application is not complete so the law does not apply.”
Additionally, the water board states that an application must contain a statement that “it is an application for a development permit” in order to meet the requirements of the Permit Streamlining Act, and that no such statement appears in the report of waste discharge.
The LARWQCB has scheduled an Oct. 1 meeting in Los Angeles to consider a prohibition of onsite wastewater disposal systems, or septic systems, in the Civic Center area. The ban would immediately forbid all new discharges from septic systems in the area, and would give existing dischargers five years to cease excretion.
“All we want to do is get our project approved and proceeded with accordingly,” Don Schmitz, head of Schmitz and Associates, Inc., the development consulting and land-use planning company representing La Paz, said Friday in a telephone interview. “We have by far the best wastewater treatment system that has ever been contemplated in Malibu and in the country.”