The project will be heard by the commission at its June 16 meeting in Marina del Rey.
By Knowles Adkisson / The Malibu Times
California Coastal Commission staff has recommended denial of coastal development permits for the development project by U2 guitarist The Edge, his family and friends in Malibu.
The commission will consider the project at its Thursday, June 16 meeting in Marina del Rey. The project proposes building five luxury homes on 156 acres on contiguous parcels overlooking Serra Canyon, as well as a 6,010 foot access road extending from Sweetwater Mesa Road.
The commission staff report concluded the project would result in significant visual impacts and that it would significantly disrupt the local vegetative habitat. Staff also determined that The Edge, whose real name is David Evans, and the other owners, who are each either friends or family, constituted a “unity of ownership,” and that they might seek to sell the houses for profit rather than live in them.
Fiona Hutton, whose public relations firm represents the applicants, excoriated the staff’s findings in a press release.
“In a blatant attempt to arrange or change the facts to support their predetermined position, the Coastal Commission staff is setting a dangerous precedent by applying standards to these property owners the staff has never used before,” Hutton wrote.
Hutton denied the commission’s characterization of the project as a “unity of ownership.” She stated that the owners do not want to sell the houses but to live in them, and that they had satisfied all legal requirements: “The property owners have a clear legal right to develop their land and have cooperated and acted in good faith throughout the permitting process.”
The development has been scheduled to go before the commission several times in the past few years, but has been withdrawn each time. It has received both local and international media attention, due to the celebrity of Evans, and also to the Coastal Commission’s suspicion that Evans wanted to build the houses and sell them at a profit. The extensive grading required for the development has also angered environmentalists.
Further controversy ensued recently when the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy voted to drop its opposition to the project in April in exchange for $1 million in donations and consulting work, as well as a slew of conservation and development restrictions around the homes that would allow for the construction of a trail through the property in the future.
Critics of the deal, which is contingent on the Coastal Commission approving the project, charged that the owners of the project had effectively bought off the SMMC, while SMMC head Joe Edmiston countered that the donations would be valuable and beneficial for future users of the trail.
The Los Angeles Times reported that Evans bought the property in 2006 for $9 million with his wife. In subsequent years, friends and family of Evans bought the four other parcels, according to documents sent to the Coastal Commission in fall of 2010 and forwarded to The Malibu Times this month.
Local residents opposed to the project, which requires large amounts of grading, have also expressed concerns over possible landslides resulting from the grading, while environmental activists say the construction would harm the property’s fragile ecosystem.