Last week, several members of Malibu’s City Council, including Mayor Joan House and councilmembers Tom Hasse and Sharon Barovsky, made a pilgrimage north to Sacramento to try and persuade the governor and the Legislature to let Malibu solve its own problems.
The primary item on the city agenda and that of the three Malibu officials was the new Local Coastal Plan (LCP), which is going to be the master land plan for Malibu. It’s this plan that is probably going to ultimately decide how much development there maybe in the Civic Center area, how many hotel and motel rooms Malibu will finally get, and what the city will finally have to do with its waste water, whether a sewer or a retrofit of septic systems.
Normally those types of decisions are local city matters providing they meet the minimal standards of the Coastal Act as policed by the California Coastal Commission. But for Malibu it’s a different situation, because last year the Legislature passed and the governor signed a bill called AB 988. This bill took local power away from the city and turned over the ultimate decision-making power to the Coastal Commission to make the Malibu Local Coastal Plan.
It was rumored they did this because they–the governor, the Speaker of the Assembly Bob Hertzberg and the president pro tem of the Senate, Sen. John Burton–were tired of waiting for Malibu to come up with its own plan. They were even more tired of getting phone calls from well-heeled Malibu constituents who were lobbying them about things like adding a deck onto their Malibu homes.
Once Malibu gets a LCP those type of matters will be purely a local concern and will no longer need Coastal Commission approval and people will instead be pestering their councilmembers and not the governor, et al.
If the LCP is going to return permitting power to the city, why are Malibu councilmembers so anxious about the Coastal Commission writing the plan?
They’re anxious because they know whoever writes the plan sets the priorities. And right now, if there are any disagreements, and they’re probably bound to be some, it’s the Coastal Commission and its staff that make the final decisions. With AB 988 the commission doesn’t need Malibu’s consent or approval. In fact, it can ignore the city if it so chooses. So Malibu’s city leaders went to Sacramento to try and get political support for the city so that it would be politically difficult, if not impossible, for the Coastal Commission to just ignore the city.
As part of that plan, Malibu struck first and Christi Hogin, interim city manager, rewrote the Malibu version of the LCP, which Malibu legislators hope will become the basis for the final LCP. This LCP will shortly be working its way up through the approval process to the Coastal Commission.
But the Coastal Commission, its chair, Sara Wan, and its director, Peter Douglas (reportedly no great fan of the City of Malibu), are not just sitting back and letting Malibu grab the initiative. They’re also moving ahead and recently got a $100,000 budget allocation to write the Coastal Commission version of the LCP. They also hired former Malibu Planning Director Joyce Parker to prepare their version of the Malibu LCP document.
Malibu political leaders asked several legislators to intervene and ask the Coastal Commission not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to begin with the proposed Malibu plan written by Hogin. Several legislators appeared sympathetic and said, in effect, “We don’t care who writes the damn thing, we just want to see that it gets done, and done quickly.”
But who writes the plan may be very significant to the City of Malibu because the city and the Coastal Commission may have very different agendas.
There are two potential areas of contention. One is the issue of public access to local beaches and the second, that there be sufficient visitor-serving amenities for the public when they come to the beaches. To the Coastal Commission, public access can mean more than just vertical access ways to the beach. It can also mean sufficient parking so that people can park near the beaches. This gets into neighborhood parking regulations. It can also involve visitor-serving amenities like hotels, motels, B&Bs, high-end restaurants, low-end restaurants, hot dog stands, and whatever.
The city and its citizens have often been less than receptive to things that will attract visitors, increase local traffic, diminish local parking, and create public safety problems for the city. The Coastal Commission’s attitude is that the beaches belong to everyone and it’s not about to let the city limit their use.
The LCP could also decide what goes into the Malibu Civic Center–what parks, what ball fields and where they’re located. So our local legislators made the rounds from the governor’s office, to Resource Secretary Mary Nichols, to State Parks Director Rusty Areias, to senators Burton, Kuehl, O’Connell to Assembly members Hannah Beth Jackson, Fran Pavley, Tony Cardenas and others, to plead their case, again and again. Only time will tell if they were successful.
City legislative priorities
– Let Malibu write its Local coastal Plan
– Allow the city to limit the number of rehab facilities in any one area
– Establish a marine sanctuary