The following letter was sent to Russ Guiney and Suzanne Goode of California State Parks.
Last week you presented State Park’s plan for Malibu Bluffs Park to the City of Malibu. This plan includes destroying six acres of children’s ballfields, which cost over $5 million to construct, and replacing them with coastal scrub because you believe the 92-acre park must be 100% scrub.
The fact that you value common shrubs more highly than our state’s children is the essence of what is dangerously wrong with the direction of the State Parks and Coastal Commission have taken. Viewing children as environmentally offensive and placing common chaparral above their future is completely out of sync with the desires and values of voters across the state. The Bluffs Park Plan is driven by a personal and subjective ideology instead of science and is abysmal public policy.
Every youth sports association in the state is opposed to the destruction of the fields. In terminating the recreational access of thousands of children for whom regular attendance at games is the only opportunity to visit Malibu Bluffs Park, you are breaching your duty to provide recreation to the residents of this state. Your plan also reflects a scandalous neglect of your fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers as destruction of the fields will cost Californians over $8 million.
You provided as a rationale for the destruction of the playfields that Yosemite does not have ballfields. Malibu Bluffs Park is not Yosemite. It is in downtown Malibu on Pacific Coast Highway within the state’s largest urban center, Los Angeles, and children’s facilities are an essential and self-evident use of this resource. However, your actions are consistent with the Coastal Commission’s ill-conceived mandate to remove advertising signage from lifeguard towers on County beaches thereby denying ocean educational opportunities to thousands of inner city youths through the Los Angeles County Youth Program that this advertising funds.
This type of disgraceful rebuke of our children will be a direct reflection on Governor Davis’ policies and attitudes towards children. As I am sure you understand, Governor Davis will realize that in true leadership for our state, the buck stops at his desk.
Anne Hoffman