CLEAN alleges the Cross Creek complex has been operating since 1986 without a wastewater
permit for storm runoff.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
Fresh from a victory against the owner of a private golf course, a local environmental group is now preparing to sue the owners of a small industrial compound off Cross Creek Road for allegedly contributing contaminated storm runoff to Malibu Creek.
Marcia Hanscom has formed a group called Coastal Law Enforcement Action Network, whose attorney has served notice that a building supply company and several other small businesses along Cross Creek Road have failed to obtain necessary stormwater runoff and coastal commission permits, which, they say, may be leading to some of the pollution at Surfrider Beach.
Hanscom and attorney Michael Weinsoff of Marin County earlier under the group, Wetlands Action Network, sued billionaire industrialist A. Jerrold Perenchio over his private golf course next to his Malibu Colony house. That suit ended when the Univision TV network owner promised to abide by environmental rules, get a coastal permit and donate the walled-off greensward for public use after he and his wife die.
Now, Weinsoff has served a 60-day notice on the owners of four lots on Cross Creek Road north of Civic Center Way. The claim maintains that storm runoff from Malibu Masonry Supply, an automotive repair shop and several other tenants is polluting Malibu Creek.
The claim is a prelude to filing a lawsuit, and gives all interested parties 60 days to discuss the issue before entering the courts.
Grant Adamson, one of the owners of the land, told The Malibu Times that an answer will be made to CLEAN’s claim, but he said he could not discuss the matter until his attorney files that legal response. Court records indicate the land is owned by Mariposa Land Company, Ltd., the Merritt Adamson Trust and the Mariposa Land Corporation, which are successors to the Adamson family’s vast Malibu landholdings.
At issue is a complex of storage trailers, an auto repair shop and the small brickyard that has been operating on four adjacent lots along Cross Creek Road just north of Civic Center Way for decades, Weinsoff said in a telephone interview. He is a former government pollution control officer and an attorney with the Santa Rosa-based Northern California Environmental Defense Center.
In the complaint, CLEAN alleges the Cross Creek complex has been operating since 1986 without a wastewater permit for storm runoff.
“The law is incredibly broad. All they have to do is download a form from the Internet and contact the state water board with a wastewater treatment plan,” he said.
Weinsoff would not specify exactly what pollutants are flowing from the industrial area into the creek, but he said he would “imagine that there’s no way they have any mechanism by which to capture the car waste from the mechanic shop, for example.”
A walk of the site showed a dirt lot with dozens of storage facilities and the brickyard, which sells numerous types of gravel, sand, flagstone and rocks. Several patches of oily dirt sit near drains. Scattered about the creek bank were several wrecked or apparently inoperative trucks, tractors and other industrial equipment.
Weinsoff said private groups like CLEAN and private activists like Hanscom are left to file environmental enforcement on their own. “Since 1978, and particularly since the passage of Proposition 13 in California, we as a society have been starving the beast that is government,” he said. “That leaves private groups like us to do the enforcement.”
Weinsoff said the industrial complex and its tenants are also operating without a coastal permit, and said CLEAN will file complaints with the Coastal Commission to accompany the water pollution charges.
“If the (owners) are willing to get those permits under the Clean Waters Act and the coastal act, then we will go away,” Weinsoff said.
Hanscom was not available for comment. She is a Malibu resident who has fought a long, largely unsuccessful battle to block the Playa Vista housing and industrial development from being built near Westchester.