Steve Lopez, the Los Angeles Times columnist who has had a lot of fun picking on Malibu in his recent columns, and I had the following e-mail dialogue, which might be of interest to readers of The Malibu Times.
On July 30, I e-mailed Steve about my walk along Malibu’s coastline and my conclusions reached from that walk. I noted that Access For All is targeting David Geffen because he is rich and values his privacy, to which he is entitled. I walked by his house below the mean high tide line without incident, talking to visitors on their beach blankets who decided to walk there from the Zonker Harris Accessway a little down PCH. No one bothered them or me. So what is the big deal? David Geffen is an incredibly generous man who has done a lot of public good with his wealth. He does not deserve your trashing, or the “in his face” loud-mouthing by the Access for All activists. (Why don’t you investigate their backgrounds and suitability to take on the public trust of maintaining such beach accesses now and in the future?)
On Aug. 9, he e-mailed me back, and after complaining that he gets 300 e-mails a day (I hope a lot of them are from Malibu residents) he said: “Access for All is targeting people not because of their wealth, but because of their duplicity. If you agree to dedicate access in return for ballooning the size of your mansion, you ought to be held to the deal, no matter who you are. Period.”
That same day, I e-mailed Steve back as follows: “The ‘agreement’ you speak of regarding coastal access was ‘extorted’ (the U.S. Supreme Court’s word, not mine) out of the homeowners as a required condition to obtaining the Coastal Commission’s permit. It is amazing how such tactics can be justified if the party using those tactics judges themselves to be on the side of what is right, as does the Coastal Commission. They are not different than the “Right to Life” extremists in this regard: the Far Left and Far Right use the same tactics to justify their actions.”
I am sending Steve a copy of my video, “Hiking Malibu’s Coastline From End to End” so he can pull his head out of the sand before he writes another column about Malibu.
Ted Vaill