Little League kids are treated to Dodgers stars and a free barbecue as developer campaigns to give land in exchange for town homes.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
The more than 20-year battle over a Trancas site escalated on Sunday when Dean Isaacson, a partner of developer Trancas PCH, brought in a pair of Los Angeles Dodgers icons to campaign for his proposal to donate what he says is $35 million worth of land in exchange for city permission to build 32 town homes.
But some of the people living in new town homes next to the land where Isaacson said three youth sports fields could be built said they would fight the project with what one promised to be “every living breath in my body.”
About 60 Trancas-area residents, both pro and con, attended the catered lunch and heard a pitch from Isaacson for the project. The town homes would be clustered northwest of the gas station on Pacific Coast Highway near Trancas Canyon Road.
Isaacson announced that he is willing to lend 28.5 acres of land to the city for immediate use on a temporary license, so that the ball fields could be built for children to use while the city and the California Coastal Commission grapple with the controversial housing project. “Once the final vesting occurs for the houses, I would transfer the license to the city and they could have the deed,” Isaacson said.
Issacson also offered to let 80 homeowners along Broad Beach connect their septic systems to the town homes’ sewage treatment plant, with the beach residents bearing the expense of about $20,000 per house.
“That’s much less than every one of those homeowners will have to pay to bring their homes into compliance with AB 855,” Isaacson said. “My offer to the Trancas homeowners association has been blocked by one board member, who won’t let the others hear of it.”
Isaacson said the treated water from the proposed treatment plant would be used to water the ball fields, would meet all health standards and would not cause any groundwater migration across Pacific Coast Highway toward Broad Beach. He said engineers predict 95 percent of the water would evapotranspirate through grass into the atmosphere.
Many of the residents along Broad Beach road are members of the Trancas Property Owners Association, which won a state Court of Appeal decision that has blocked Isaacson’s offer, which has been updated with his recent announcements. The court has agreed to rehear the matter, but only on whether the City Council violated a state open-meeting law when it approved the deal, not if the deal is valid. So if the city and the developer want a settlement, they will have to negotiate a new one.
Isaacson has accused the City Council of backing out if its agreement when it declined to add a zoning change of the property to its list of Local Coastal Program amendment proposals it is preparing for the Coastal Commission. The council members defended their decision by saying they did not want to put the proposal before the Coastal Commission prior to the project completing the city-level planning process.
Marshall Grossman, a Broad Beach homeowner and association board member, said its hydrologists disagree with Isaacson’s theory.
“The water that is introduced to that hillside ends up in either surface water runoff … or it results in an increase in the subsurface water table,” Grossman said this week in a telephone interview.
Those saturated water tables resulted in the collapse of Pacific Coast Highway near Isaacson’s last condo project and cost $5 million in federal repair funds, Grossman said.
“It is really a shame that the developer must think the residents of Malibu are stupid enough to accept ball fields without acknowledging the environmental hazards that this represents,” Grossman said.
At Sunday’s barbecue, a handful of Malibu Little League players and their parents met Dodgers greats Don Newcombe and Al Downing, who enthusiastically signed baseballs and campaigned for the additional baseball and soccer fields that would be built on 28.5 acres of donated land north of the proposed town homes.
Little League parent Larry Aubrey accepted a $5,000 donation from Isaacson, and said afterward that his group “is using Dean [Isaacson] just exactly as much as he is using us.
“We understand that there have to be compromises made, and this is the only way we are going to get our youths additional park space,” Aubrey said.
A large number of project opponents reside in a recent Isaacson development, the Lunita Pacific town homes that are just west of the proposed ball fields. Other opponents of the new project also bitterly fought the construction of Lunita Pacific.
Residents of the existing development expressed outrage that athletic fields are being proposed next to their homes, and would be accessed using a section of road in front of their houses.
“It is completely intolerable that they would put a field next to us,” Lunita resident Christine Anderson said. “There is the noise factor, and the crowd factor. I would rather have the development-the park fields would be the end of our peace of mind.”
Other Lunita Pacific residents were also vociferous in their opposition: “Why do we need so many parks when we only have 13,000 people?” asked town homeowner Meg Bavaro. “There are 20 acres up at the high school, why don’t they put the fields up there?”
One veteran Trancas Canyon Road resident, who would possibly lose his sunset view of the beach, was more accepting.
“We bought here 45 years ago, and we always knew we might lose our fabulous view,” Steve Steere said. “We’d prefer to have an open field, but I’m hoping for the best, and the kids could sure use more fields.”