Farmers and ranchers can be friends

By The Malibu Times · Wed Apr 17 2002

From the publisher/Arnold G. York

This Saturday I was among a large group of people who headed for a conference at Calamigos Ranch to spend a few hours listening and talking about the California Coastal Commission's Local Coastal Plan (LCP) for Malibu. This time, it was not the usual cast of characters present. In fact, the song from the Broadway show "Oklahoma" about cowboys and farmers being friends kept running through my head.

At Calamigos there were cowboys with big hats and pointed boots, realtors and mortgage bankers, lawyers and land consultants, the Farm Bureau, the chardonnay and Brie crowd from Malibu, including our own City Council, and there was certainly a number of card carrying members of the property rights, pickup and gun rack crowd. Strangely enough, we all had one big thing in common-none of us can stand the Coastal Commission.

As a group of speakers took turns explaining what was wrong with the draft Malibu LCP, I began to understand that I had been wrong about the Coastal Commission. I always thought the Malibu LCP was just sort of a personal grudge match between Coastal Commission Chair Sara Wan, commission Director Peter Douglas and the wee citizens of Malibu.

It turns out the Coastal Commission's sights are on a much larger picture, and much more ambitious. It's looking to become a super agency, and the way it intends to accomplish that is to turn the entire California Coast into an environmentally sensitive habitat area (ESHA), from Oregon to the Mexican border. The reason the room was filled with opposition is that people are just beginning to realize this. The commission has already begun to use the policies it has put together for Malibu in the unincorporated hills above us.

If Coastal Commission opponents are correct, this is what it would mean, not only in Malibu, but also along the coast in all of the hills and, later, up and down the entire state.

The coastal commissioners conduct their business with a very sneaky strategy. They never say you can't have something. They just set up a series of policies, each somewhat rational, but, which, when taken altogether, make it impossible to continue certain activities in the coastal zone.

So here's a list of the activities they're after:

• There will be no horses in the coastal zone, and that means the hills because the coastal zone goes inland five miles. There are a series of policies, which make it impossible to have a corral, a stable, a tack room, a barn or any of those things. No one gets grandfathered in either. Once the LCP is passed, much of existing property is non-conforming, and the moment you need a permit, they can say, "Make it conform. Tear down that non-conforming barn, that corral, that fence, even those non-native plantings."

• The Coastal Commission has a limit on how much of your lot you can use. If you have a 40-acre parcel, which is roughly 1,750,000 square feet, you will be allowed 10,000 square feet or 25 percent of the parcel for development-that is, whichever is less. In the 10,000 square feet you have to squeeze a house, a pool, a barn, perhaps other structures. (For reference, a pool is about 7,000 square feet and a fire department mandated turnaround, which is required in some places, is about 3,000 square feet.)

• Everything is an ESHA, an ESHA buffer or a new concept called a connectivity zone. That means, if you're not in an ESHA, or an ESHA buffer, but you've got a piece of land they call a connectivity zone-which merely means some wandering bobcat with a bad sense of direction happens to cross your land, or might cross your land, or is thinking about crossing your land-well then, you're in an ESHA, even if you're not.

Lord knows where their institutional greed will take them next, but one thing became obvious-we're not alone and people are waking up to the fact that these coastal people are out of control. They are scaring the heck out of the farmers, the banks, the insurance companies, the recreation crowd, the ranchers, plain old homeowners like most of us (think of what you may have to disclose if you want to sell and move out), the sports fishermen, the resource companies, and lots of cities and counties that view this as a major move to take away local control.

Ask yourself this, "Who gave the California Coastal Commission this special wisdom so it and only it can protect the coast?"

To be against the Coastal Commission is not to be against environmentalism, it's just to be against it and its incredible self-assurance that it and only it has been ordained to do the job.

This is a bigger battle than just Malibu. This is a fight to protect our rights to control our lives and not have them dictated by some remote agency, answerable to no one but itself.

The battle is just beginning.