Pam Linn would like the Broad Beach residents to “lighten up,” but her reasoning is based on false information.
I agree with her that people should have the option, “even those who don’t have the means to buy it,” to sit quietly and read or eat by the shore.
I have lived on the beach for 16 years, and I’ve seen hundreds of people do just that here. And they still do. But Sara Wan didn’t come down to the beach to sit quietly or read or eat her lunch. She came down to stir things up. What makes Pam Linn think that “naturally, she had documents to prove her right to sit on that particular patch of sand”?
I was present at Mrs. Wan’s performance art, and I don’t believe Mrs. Wan had any such thing. She waved around several sheets of printed aerial photographs of the beach with black rectangles marked on them. When I asked to see them, she refused and clutched them to her. As far as I could tell, she was claiming that there was a 25-foot easement on that particular piece of property for the public to use. When I paced off the 25 feet to the mean high tide line to show her that we were above the easement, if there was one, and actually on private property, she dismissed this by saying that “it’s not the mean high tide line, but the ambient water line.” I paced it off again to show her that she was still wrong. In fact, the L.A. Times photograph of Mrs. Wan plumped down on the sand actually showed her in the act of trespassing. If the Los Angeles Times reporter and/or Mrs. Wan had looked at the signs they were so quick to condemn, they would have seen that they were clearly marked at more than 25 feet above the mean high tide line.
If they had listened to us, they would have known that our security patrols on the beach are instructed to try to cut visitors as much slack as possible without invading the privacy of homeowners. Mrs. Wan wasn’t just pushing the envelope, she was well outside of it. Most of the easements that Mrs. Wan claimed to exist on Broad Beach are not actually easements, but “offers to dedicate” (OTD). These offers have been extracted from certain homeowners by the Coastal Commission as part of the price of the Commission’s granting a building or remodeling permit. In 1987, in Nollan vs. the California Coastal Commission, the U.S. Supreme court ruled against this practice, calling it “out-and-out plan of extortion.”
The Coastal Commission staff has made no bones about its intention to take away private property without compensation for public use, despite the Nollan ruling. We have heard Peter Douglas, CEO of the CCC, say so in no uncertain terms. And I believe that Mrs. Wan’s staged confrontation, besides being a demonstration of her own personal animus against some people in Malibu, is part of a continuing propaganda battle being waged by the Commission and its allies.
Marshall Lumsden