Forge Lodge shrinking;mysterious bill sneaks by
The shrinking Forge Bed and Breakfast
I sat in on the Planning Commission hearing Monday night, while they were debating the 32-room Forge Lodge B&B, which is planned for a parcel of land near Beaurivage Restaurant. Karen and I went to lend our support to Daniel and Luciana Forge, who have been fighting this battle for longer than we’ve even owned the paper, which is 15 years.
The meeting went on for five hours, but we gave up in despair after two because it was sort of like watching Kabuki Theater, which is a very stylized drama where everyone knows the ending. It was clear the Planning Commission was going to hem and haw, and then throw a bone to the lodge’s opposition and cut the project down from 32 units to, perhaps, 28 or even 24 units.
The commission finally compromised at 28 units, but stuck on a few additional conditions that may make it iffy this project will ever be built the way most of us would like to see it built, that is, as a beautiful, luxurious, woodsy bed and breakfast in the style of the Ventana Inn in Big Sur. It’s sad, because right now it’s a pretty, woodsy, 5-acre parcel of land that no one sees, or uses and most people don’t even know exists. If the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Federal National Park Service, which both oppose the project, have their way, it will remain undiscovered, unused and unseen.
The mysterious AB 2891
You may recall that I wrote recently about Assembly Bill 2891, which cleared the Legislature recently and was signed by the governor. It effectively said the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (SMMC) could do whatever it wants with the Streisand Center in Ramirez Canyon, which actually isn’t called the Streisand Center anymore because even Barbra got disgusted that the conservancy wants to turn it into a catering facility, and demanded it take her name off it.
We tried to find out how AB 2891, authored by Assemblymember Paul Koretz of West Hollywood, seemed to slip through the Legislature under the radar, without anyone knowing it was probably going to overrule a recent court decision the City of Malibu had won against the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. In the decision, the Court of Appeals said the SMMC needed a city permit to operate a catering hall in the back of a residential canyon. The SMMC was apparently not happy with the decision and took immediate action to get it reversed in the Legislature, without telling anyone what it was doing, including the Legislature, of course.
We asked our own legislators, Assemblymember Fran Pavley and Sen. Sheila Kuehl, how it happened. Neither of them knew anything about it until after the fact, they said. Then, SMMC Executive Director Joe Edmiston called me and basically said I was overreacting. I needn’t be nervous, because it wasn’t the intention of the SMMC to overuse the facility at the end of little Ramirez Canyon, and the conservancy would scrupulously follow the conditions of the coastal permit it received from the California Coastal Commission. Although much relieved to hear that Joe was actually considering following the law, I didn’t have the bad taste to point out to him that my own feeling was that if Joe went back to the Coastal Commission and said he wanted to put a football stadium in the back of Ramirez Canyon, they might actually object, at first. However, once Joe explained it would serve as a learning experience, particularly for handicapped and inner city children, the Coastal Commission would readily agree to whatever he wanted, provided it didn’t seat more than 70,000 fans. The Coastal Commission, you see, is deeply concerned with preserving the environmental integrity of the coastal zone. Unless, of course, its friends are involved.
Kuehl, our state senator, told The Malibu Times she didn’t think AB 2891 necessarily reversed the appellate court decision. Now Kuehl is a very smart lady and a hell of a good lawyer. She could very well be right because in the SMMC’s desire to make sure that no one understood what it was doing, it made the legal language so vague it’s possible that some court might decide it’s too vague and throw it out.
However, Joe didn’t see it that way, and, in a memo to the board of the SMMC, he crowed about how AB 2891 knocked out the court decision favorable to Malibu. Joe also has said publicly that Malibu was asleep at the switch, and had the city paid attention and attended the SMMC meetings, city officials would have picked it up. So it’s our own fault. The problem with that analysis is the offending language got snuck in somewhere in the state Senate. So, unless Malibu had someone on the Senate floor that day, they never would have known what the SMMC wanted to do. Well, I guess it’s just going to stay one of those great mysteries.