This week marks two years since California Governor Jerry Brown allocated $7.58 million toward improvements at Malibu sector State Parks, and though piling replacement at the historic Malibu Pier has been completed, other projects have faced difficulties as work toward completion continues.
The other two projects allocated money from the 2014-15 budget were a re-engineering and replacement of access stairs at Point Dume State Beach, budgeted at a whopping $2.7 million, and an investigation into water intrusion and roof replacement at the historic Adamson House. Neither of those projects had been completed to date.
Malibu Pier work
After multiple phases of work stretching over two years, the budgeted $4,617,700 pier piling replacement project was completed earlier this year. State Parks could not confirm the exact dollar amount the project cost.
The piling replacement, which occurred in two separate phases, paved the way for restoration of the long-broken gangway at the far end of the 100-year-old pier.
“When it comes to the pier, they came in on budget and on time,” pier concessionaire and Malibu City Council member Jefferson “Zuma Jay” Wagner confirmed.
The access the stairway provides, not only for yachts but for lifeguard and fire department boats, makes it a public safety concern, and completion of the project is a sigh of relief for those who have been waiting on repairs.
Angeles District Superintendent Craig Sap said the pier project was finished “much sooner” than the anticipated end date, which ran through the end of July.
An additional project, not associated with the 2015 budget allocation, is an improvement to the septic system for restaurants and businesses operating on the pier.
Wagner described the issue with the septic system: Blackwater (raw sewage) pipes running from the end of the pier, when connected with pipes from the businesses at the close end of the pier, create “back pressure, and back pressure creates pressure on the joints.” However, Wagner said, there is no cause for alarm the way the system functions currently.
“The processing system itself is safe and it’s high quality,” he said. “It functions. It’s checked weekly, and the chemicals are added weekly. The system itself works.”
Sap said the money for that repair was coming as a result of a statewide gas tax.
“We’ve got additional wastewater money we’re getting as a result of SB-1, the gas tax,” he said. “State Parks is getting a percentage of that—small percentage.”
Adamson House
Upkeep issues at the 80-year-old Adamson House have been well publicized over the years, but $247,500 from the 2014-15 budget was designed to go toward improvements that would preserve the aging structure, which for years has had issues with water intrusion, leaks and erosion. Two years after that money was allocated, no physical work to keep water out of the house has begun.
“We’re still working with the house. We’ve identified those areas of water intrusion and we’re working on excluding those,” Sap described. “The other one is the roof, and that should go out to bid pretty soon, and that will help improve issues with the house.”
Sap added that he had “no idea” when work would begin to shore up the house’s roof.
“I’m hoping that we get these going out to bid and hopefully it’s something we can start and complete before the spring,” he added.
Work was underway at the house, though, as a joint effort from California State Parks and the Malibu Adamson House Foundation led to the decision to rehabilitate the lath house on the property—an issue representatives from both groups pointed to as a high priority.
“The lath house was ready to collapse,” Wagner, who has been on the executive board of the Adamson House Foundation for a decade, explained. “Where things like screen doors and addressing the roof leaks are also identified problems, the collapse of the lath house in a big wind event would have made it even more expensive to replace than fix.”
Sap echoed Wagner in his description of the project, which came in at a few hundred thousand dollars.
“The lath house was a project that’s already been scoped out, meaning it was shovel-ready,” Sap detailed. “It was in dire need. Structurally, it was in bad shape. For us to defer that any longer, the lath house was in risk of collapsing.
“That was an easy one, a low dollar amount, and [was undertaken] in partnership with the foundation,” Sap continued.
Wagner confirmed the Adamson House Foundation pledged $70,000 toward the project.
Both Sap and Wagner acknowledged a slip-up with the lath house’s posts resulted in an increase of cost and time for the project.
“There was an issue with posts considered to be noncompliant, but we’ve remedied that,” Sap said briefly.
“The quality of work is sufficient,” Wagner said, though he added an error with the request for information on the project meant the state incurred additional fees for the fix.
“Now it’s finding the right products and the right process for reconstruction,” Wagner said. “I think the job will be completed successfully and replicate what was there. It’s just going to cost a little bit more.”
Point Dume access stairway
The initial $2.7 million price tag estimated for the replacement of an access stairway at Point Dume State Beach initially raised eyebrows in the city, but it seems that cost was on the low end, according to information shared by State Parks.
“It went out to bid, and we had bids that came in above what we had hoped they’d come in at,” Sap described. “We rebid it and we should have bid openings in September and hopefully we’ll start the project by January of this year, which is hopefully about the time we’d do the project.”
Sap clarified that the timeline for that project was still about on track, since the rebidding process is much quicker than an initial bid.
“We’d like to have this done in the off season, when it’s not impacting the public,” Sap described, though he could not offer a more exact timeline.
