Malibu Lagoon restoration opponents’ biggest obstacle is raising enough money in legal fees to file a lawsuit against the project.
By Paul Sisolak / Special to The Malibu Times
Rushing to meet a Dec. 2 filing deadline, local activists are in the process of pursuing quick legal action with strong hopes of stopping a project to renovate Malibu Lagoon they say could damage area wetlands and wildlife.
The director of the regional Wetlands Defense Fund (WDF) said that a lawsuit might now be necessary to halt the $7 million project after receiving unanimous approval last month from the California Coastal Commission, and following the state Wildlife Conservation’s approval of a $4 million grant on Nov. 18 to the California Department of Parks and Recreation for the construction phase of the lagoon restoration.
“Our lawyers are seriously reviewing what legal actions they might take,” WDF head Marcia Hanscom said.
(The Malibu Times went to print before it was known what position the WDF would take. Look for updates to this story online at www.malibutimes.com)
The project, which was coordinated by the California Department of Parks and Recreation and Heal the Bay under a grant from the California Coastal Conservancy, proposes moving the existing parking lot, creating a new water channel, recontouring existing water channels, as well as planting native vegetation around 12 acres of the lagoon in place of non-native species, which will be bulldozed away. Among the chief reasons for the plan, project proponents say, is to improve water flow of the lagoon, which will in turn improve conditions for bottom-dwelling creatures.
But Hanscom and the WDF, primary opponents to the restoration plans, claim that some illegality potentially exists behind the estimated two-month-long project, scheduled to start in June, because the lives of several endangered species may be put at risk.
“It’ll be damaging to endangered species, as well as rare species and intermediately rare and common species,” says Roy van de Hoek, a marine biologist who has worked with the WDF.
Van de Hoek said the tidewater goby is one of the most endangered breeds of fish in the lagoon threatened by the project, along with “a whole spectrum of animals that will be hurt irreversibly for a long time and never come back.”
Van de Hoek said he believes that the dredging of the lagoon is not only invasive to birds, fish and plant life there, but unnecessary.
“My own scientific estimate is that the water quality’s good now. You couldn’t improve it for fish and plants,” he said. “It’s a clean, healthy water ecosystem.”
Backers of the project, however, say the time is now to restore the Malibu Lagoon, after previous efforts 27 years ago did more to hinder, rather than restore, the natural flow of the wetlands.
That restoration, which carved out three separate channels in an attempt to facilitate better tidal flow through the lagoon’s waterways, has produced the opposite effect so many years later, and instead of naturally flushing the lagoon, now clogs it with built-up sediment, said Mark Abramson, director for the Watershed Program at Santa Monica Baykeeper, a project proponent.
“If we knew then what we know now, we would have done it a lot differently,” he said. “But there wasn’t a lot of wetland restoration being done then.”
Both Abramson and Shelley Luce, executive director of the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, which will with Heal the Bay oversee that restoration, maintain that unless non-native plants are removed and problems within the lagoon are corrected soon, the dangers posed are very real: wildlife and other species at the waterway, they say, could be severely decimated during the next few years.
“Removing invasive vegetation is something that some people fight,” Luce said. “But these plants are hurting our ecosystem. If we don’t fix the problem, then the tidal channels will continue to fill in until there’s no inter-tidal habitat.”
Abramson also noted that alternatives proposed by project opponents, such as hydraulic dredging of the lagoon during a slow, three- to four-year period, wouldn’t be as effective as the project currently in the works.
Another concern for Hanscom and the WDF is that the final project was rubber stamped without enough involvement and input from Malibu residents.
“By the time the public really knew what was happening … this was a train that had been clearly been going down the track fast for a long time,” she said.
But Luce responded to these claims by citing extensive work and public meetings via the 85-member lagoon task force, comprised mostly of residents and academics from the restoration commission, Heal the Bay, UCLA and others.
As of this week, the WDF’s biggest obstacle is raising enough money in legal fees to file a lawsuit against the project. Hanscom said her group still needs an added $200,000 to $300,000, to adequately cover attorney costs.
“I think, in Malibu, sometimes there’s an assumption that someone else is taking care of it because it’s a wealthy area,” she said. “But we’re struggling to find the money.”
The WDF, in the past few months, has kept a regular presence at local farmers markets, as well as holding small fundraisers, to raise money. The group recently received $2,500 from a Malibu resident.
Yet despite increasing doubt, Hanscom remained optimistic that the state-headed project can be halted.
“Are we going to have enough money to file before the deadline?” she asked. “We’re up against state of California lawyers and we’re not sure what others might come in as part of this. It’s a big legal challenge, no question.”