The following was addressed to Sen. Fran Pavley.
Many of us here in Malibu don’t agree with you in your support of the Malibu Lagoon Restoration Plan. This is just another government excess, which will do more harm than good to the environment, to public access, and to local businesses. This blunderbuss approach has been tried once before, in 1983. Now, 28 years later, it is being done again, and in a few years the lagoon will again silt up, and another governmental destruction of the habitat will ensue.
I question the good faith of many of the principals supporting this misguided effort. The funds for this “restoration plan” were obtained from a 2002 Clean Drinking Water Bond. I suspect that the money was sitting there for the taking, and this project was dreamed up to make use of the funds, paying off friends to develop the restoration plan, and $670,000 was paid to Heal the Bay, and more to the Sierra Club, to buy their support. And $7 million will be paid to the companies doing the restoration destruction. Even the City of Malibu has been bought off.
The opponents of this project are those of us who actually live in Malibu and enjoy the lagoon, including the birds whose fecal matter has caused the problem, as well as environmental groups such as the Wetlands Action Network and Access For All, who were frozen out of the CEQA process leading up to the decision to allow the project to go forward, under the guise that there was “no controversy.” There certainly was (and is), and if the judge who is hearing the lawsuit seeking to enjoin the project does not act before June 1 to stop the bulldozers, many of us here in Malibu will do so.
Edward E. (Ted) Vaill