The staff recommends issuing a coastal development permit for the bed and breakfast project, although a more restrictive one that would require demolition of the owners’ living quarters.
By Jonathan Friedman/Assistant Editor
With a lawsuit still pending on the city permit it received, the Forge Lodge Bed and Breakfast will go before the California Coastal Commission on Friday for a coastal development permit at a meeting in San Pedro.
Coastal Commission staff has recommended the commission approve the project, although a more restrictive one than the city approved in 2003. The staff has recommended the 27-unit, 580-square-foot bed and breakfast and the rest of the project to be set-back at least 100 feet from the local environmental sensitive habitat area, or ESHA. This is required by the Malibu Local Coastal Program. Although compliance with this recommendation means project owners Daniel and Luciana Forge must demolish the building on the property, at Pacific Coast Highway north of Corral Canyon, where they reside to accommodate the parking lot, Forge attorney Alan Block said he and his clients had to accept it.
“If we don’t agree to that, we may end up in litigation with the Coastal Commission,” Forge said. “We don’t want to do that.”
Since one of the major issues in the Sierra Club lawsuit is that the city approved the project to be within the 100-foot ESHA threshold, Block said he hoped the Sierra Club would drop the suit. He said he contacted Sierra Club attorney Frank Angel with the new plans, but has not heard back from him. Angel was not available for comment prior to the publication of this article.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs ruled against the Sierra Club’s lawsuit last summer. The organization later filed an appeal, which has not been heard. In Janavs’ decision, she rejected arguments made by the Sierra Club that the project’s environmental impact report was insufficient. This included allegations that the project would harm the reintroduction of Southern steelhead trout to nearby Solstice Creek, that the project was not a bed and breakfast but rather a hotel, which the site is not zoned for, and that not enough had been done by the city to determine the effect on the site’s cultural resources, which Angel said included the land being the site of a former Chumash Indian village and burial ground.
Dave Brown, conservation chair of the Sierra Club’s Santa Monica Mountains Task Force, told The Malibu Times last summer that Janavs made a conservative decision and ignored important issues. He said the Coastal Commission staff’s recommendation was a step in the right direction.
“We still have some issues,” Brown said. “I haven’t yet seen an accurate map. I don’t know if these buildings are really are setback 100 feet. There are other things we need resolved too.”
Block said he would not be surprised if the Sierra Club does not accept the project map’s designation of where the ESHA is. He added, “As far as I’m concerned, these guys are not going to be satisfied with anything.”
The Coastal Commission already approved a coastal development permit several years ago for an 18,000-square foot shopping center and parking garage to be built on the land. The Forges have since scrapped that plan and put together the one for the bed and breakfast. The reason why this project is going before the Coastal Commission for a coastal development permit rather than the city is because this permit would function as an amendment to the one received for the shopping center, and that was done before the Malibu LCP was put into law and placed the city in charge of coastal permitting.