City wins Legacy Park lawsuit.
By Olivia Damavandi / Assistant Editor
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Thomas I. McKnew on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit filed last year against the City of Malibu by Santa Monica Baykeeper, which claimed the city-approved Legacy Park Project violates state law by failing to meet water quality standards and failing to adequately treat wastewater generated in the Civic Center area.
The $50 million, 15-acre Legacy Park, located along Pacific Coast Highway at Webb Way, will double as a storm water treatment facility. It was originally intended to treat wastewater as well, until the city in 2007 concluded from initial planning studies that it was not large enough to do so.
The elimination of a wastewater treatment from the park plans had caused environmental groups, including Baykeeper, Heal the Bay and the Surfrider Foundation, to revolt against the city’s plans to move forward with construction, especially after the Malibu City Council approved the park’s environmental impact report in a 3-2 vote in January.
“This proves by a court ruling that the city council is on the right side of the environment and that Santa Monica Baykeeper was on the wrong,” Councilmember Andy Stern said Tuesday in a phone interview. “That’s proof by a court of law.”
Though city officials are pleased with the outcome, they say the lawsuit prevented the city from obtaining a $5 million grant approved by the State Water Resources Control Board for the project.
“I hope Baykeeper is happy with themselves for trying to stop a clean water project and costing the city millions of dollars that would have been better spent on clean water projects,” Mayor Sharon Barovsky said Tuesday in a phone interview.
City Attorney Christi Hogin explained that the city would have likely obtained the $5 million grant in August, but that the lawsuit destroyed its eligibility to receive state funding for the project. “Baykeeper knows that, they knew that all along,” Hogin said Tuesday. “They wanted it for leverage against us.”
The city is still in line to receive grant money, which will only become available if other projects that have been awarded state funding receive construction bids that are less than the estimates that were used in the grants they received. A city official, who preferred to remain anonymous, said it might take a month and a half to find out how much, if any, grant money is available.
Construction of Legacy Park is currently underway, and is slated to be finished in October 2010. The city says it is committed to treating wastewater in the Civic Center area, and in January authorized $2.6 million for the preliminary design and engineering of a centralized wastewater treatment facility. A site for the facility, however, has not been confirmed.
“Legacy Park will reduce pollution and improve water quality in Malibu Creek, Malibu Lagoon and world-famous Surfrider Beach,” Barovsky said in a press release. “We are eager to get this innovative storm water treatment and environmental restoration project completed as soon as possible, so children and adults can fully enjoy the health and recreational benefits of additional open space and a clean ocean.”
Baykeeper lawsuit against La Paz dismissed.
Malibu La Paz Ranch, LLC on Tuesday cleared a hurdle in its 10-year effort to build a shopping center in the Civic Center area after the Los Angeles Superior Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Santa Monica Baykeeper against the City of Malibu. The lawsuit challenged the city’s approval of the development’s environmental impact report.
But the building battle is far from over. Following its ratification of a septic system ban in the broader Civic Center area, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board this week proposed an order that would forbid La Paz from obtaining a wastewater discharge permit.
The regional board is expected to vote on the order at a public hearing slated for Feb. 4 in Los Angeles. An appeal filed in August by La Paz against the regional board’s decision deeming that its project application was incomplete will also be discussed at the hearing.
In November 2008, the Malibu City Council approved both an 112,000-square-foot and a 99,000-square-foot version of the La Paz project, which would be located at the intersection of Civic Center Way and Cross Creek Road. Both plans include a collection of retail, restaurant and office buildings ranging in size from 6,000 square feet to 17,000 square feet. The larger option requires a coastal development permit and is pending approval by the California Coastal Commission, but the smaller one does not.
In the larger version, Malibu La Paz Ranch, LLC offers to donate 2.3 acres of the parcel and $500,000 to the City of Malibu for “any municipal purpose,” including a wastewater treatment plant.
Both the tentative order and the appeal will be reviewed by the State Water Resources Control Board, which may dismiss the appeal or order the regional board to reevaluate the application before taking further action. Hearing dates for these items have not yet been set.
Santa Monica Baykeeper in its lawsuit against La Paz stated the development project could adversely impact local waters, and that the city should not have approved the project until a centralized wastewater treatment system is in place. Don Schmitz, head of Schmitz and Associates, Inc., the development consulting and land-use planning company representing La Paz, said the project’s high quality wastewater treatment system would be as good as hooking up to a centralized system.
In addition, the ban of septic systems in central and eastern Malibu cannot be enacted without the state board’s blessing. Since the state board has not yet ratified the septic prohibition, some say the regional board’s order to deny La Paz a discharge permit is untimely.
“Their order is based on the prohibition, which isn’t law yet,” La Paz Attorney Tamar Stein said Tuesday in a phone interview. “The state board must bless it and they have not acted.”
“I think it’s unfair for the regional board to do that. They need to be working with the city in trying to help us implement a sewer system in the Civic Center,” Mayor Pro Tem Jefferson Wagner said Monday in a phone interview. “To implement something that soon without the state board giving appraisal I think is immature and unfair to the city.”
La Paz claims its project application is complete by law under the Permit Streamlining Act, which requires that development project applications be reviewed and their completeness determined within 30 days of submission. The appellant states it submitted the application and all required documentation on Dec. 2, 2008, but did not receive any response from the LARWQCB until after Jan. 2 of this year. La Paz Attorney Tamar Stein told The Malibu Times in August that the report of waste discharge would be deemed complete by law if the LARWQCB did not act on it by Aug. 31.
“I think the regional board is scrambling to find ways to thwart our pending appeal before the state board because they do not want La Paz to be developed until there is a centralized sewage treatment plant, regardless of how clean its Title 22 system is,” Schmitz said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “But I am happy and relieved that such a herculean effort on the environmental review by the applicant and the city to do it right was recognized by the court.”
The regional board states that though the application includes a conceptual Title 22 engineering report, which details the capabilities of its proposed wastewater treatment system, a final engineering report approved by both the regional board and the Department of Public Health must be obtained. Additionally, the regional board states that an application must contain a statement that “it is an application for a development permit” in order to meet the requirements of the Permit Streamlining Act, and that no such statement appears in the report of waste discharge.
Calls to Santa Monica Baykeeper representatives were not returned.