From the Publisher/Arnold York
Like reluctant students showing up for a 9 a.m. botany class, we tromped down to the Queen Mary last Thursday to get educated, carrying in our lattes with an extra shot of espresso because we knew this was going to be a long one.
The California Coastal Commission staff billed the event as a 3-hour workshop to provide the commission (meaning the commissioners) with factual information on the significance of native habitats in the Santa Monica Mountains. The subtitle really was, “Why we should designate all of Malibu as an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA).”
It was a strange place to hold a seminar on the flora and fauna of the Santa Monica Mountains. This once ornate grand ballroom of the fabled ocean liner Queen Mary, with old enlarged photographs of Clark Gable and other noteworthy icons hung on the bulkheads (that’s walls for you landlubbers), didn’t contain so much as a potted plant, but the academics were not put off. Like the good biology professors they were, they plodded ahead, with their slides and their little light pointers. And the memories came flooding back of other times, other lecture halls and other professorial voices droning on, and me sitting there wondering if any of this was going to be on the final exam.
Except this time it was very different because there was a ferocious battle going on, even though it was being conducted in quiet, reasoned academic tones. It really was a Darwinian struggle by two separate groups, each for the same piece of turf-Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains
On one side were the bureaucrats of the Coastal Commission, backed by a hand-chosen phalanx of academics and park agency types, attempting to develop a rationale to justify controlling everything in the mountains and on the coastal plain (which includes Malibu). The linchpin of their argument (which, I’ll admit I’m oversimplifying) on which they’re basing this need for control is that the Santa Monicas are rare and in danger of dying unless we act. The mountains, the hillsides and the beaches are all connected and civilization is intruding on the plants and animals. Without protection, they’ll soon be gone and with it will come destruction of our bio system on which we all depend.
On the other side stood the fair City of Malibu and its citizens and, in no small measure, the County of Los Angeles (which recognizes a power grab when it sees one). Also included on this side were the mountain people, farmers, horse people, mountain bikers and homeowners associations. These groups are unified in the belief that the Coastal Commission bureaucrats are all just running in circles shouting, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling. Give us more power.”
Somewhere between those two positions lies the truth. However, the truth wasn’t going to be easy to discern because the Coastal Commission staff had carefully stacked the presentation so it was overwhelmingly their point of view. Of the 20 speakers scheduled to present over the 3 hours, poor City of Malibu had all of 5 minutes to present its position, which is exactly what the County of Los Angeles got also.
But strangely enough, things often don’t go as smoothly as planned. The second speaker from the California Department of Fish and Game described the process his department goes through before declaring anything an ESHA. It appeared considerably more scientific and less political than the very truncated methodology the Coastal Commission was pursuing. Under questioning by some commissioners, it became clear that deciding what to designate as an ESHA wasn’t quite so cut and dried as the coastal staff would have had the commissioners believe from their Malibu LCP proposal.
Apparently, deciding what is and what isn’t an ESHA is a very complicated analysis. It depends on geography, wind, grasses, soils, proximity to water, whether it’s a north-facing slope or a south-facing slope, the animals, the recency and magnitude of fires, floods, slides and the presence of civilization (meaning people), roads, drainage, watersheds, pets and septic systems.
What emerged is a picture of life as a very complicated and frequently very interrelated process. The coastal staff approach of one-rule-fits-all, apparently, is highly questionable and thought by some to be doomed to failure.
The county representative indicated that they handle this complicated process by being very site specific, and giving different levels of protection to different areas, reserving the highest level of protection for rare and especially valuable things like areas around streams and oaks and such. That was markedly different to what the coastal staff was proposing, which wa-it’s all an ESHA unless you can prove it isn’t.
Ultimately, it’s hard to know whether any of this means anything.
Judging from some of the commissioners’ questions and their expressions of profuse appreciation for their staff’s work, I can only conclude that, for many commissioners, their judgment will end up being whatever Executive Director Peter Douglas and Chair Sara Wan want.
But I will admit that trying to read a group by its questions is sometimes no better than trying to read tea leaves. Besides, the group may change. There is a new assembly speaker and he’s beginning to make his appointments to the Coastal Commission, which could change the chemistry of the group. It’s almost three months until the California Coastal Commission has to make a final decision on the Malibu Local Coastal Plan. In politics, 90 days is a long time. It’s my guess that almost anything could still happen.