It is now abundantly clear what Mayor Jeff Jennings and his more-than-compliant City Council intend to do. Jennings and the Council pretended during Coastal Commission hearings to care about the residents of Malibu who wanted to obtain coastal permits to build decks or add on guesthouses. Yet, they evidently do not care about holding these same Malibu residents up for an unspecified amount of time while they use scarce city funds to sue the State of California for upholding the law and attempting to protect the precious natural resources with which Malibu is so blessed.
Jennings and the City Attorney have conspired to place what amounts to a moratorium on all development in Malibu, which hurts the current residents and businesses, while the Council focuses on their primary prize: the massive Perenchio/Malibu Bay Company (MBC) development. Of course, if a public interest group or a neighborhood association wants to learn of the details of this horrific plan, they have to fork out the money to pay for it (and it’s not cheap!)
Jerry Perenchio just totaled up more than $1.02 million in donations to Gray Davis during the past four years to gain what he wanted in the Malibu Local Coastal Program (LCP.) And he can’t do what other developers throughout this state do and pay for printed copies of the draft Environmental Impact Report and the Technical Appendices (where the real facts are usually hidden) to be distributed to groups like Sierra Club, Surfrider Foundation, Wetlands Action Network, Santa Monica Baykeeper, Heal the Bay, California Native Plant Society, and the many neighborhood and civic groups in Malibu who will be severely impacted by this proposed development?
Perenchio’s development will gridlock Pacific Coast Highway, take away our most important fire staging area in the Civic Center, and add huge amounts of impermeable surface (concrete, rooftops, asphalt) to the watershed, which means Malibu Lagoon and Trancas Lagoon will never be clean enough to swim or surf in without the fear of becoming ill. Good thing their plan includes an expanded medical facility. We’ll surely need one.
Marcia Hanscom
Sierra Club Board of Directors
Executive Director, Wetlands Action Network