News Analysis

By The Malibu Times · Tue Dec 31 2002

The Year 2002 in review

The battle between Malibu and the California Coastal Commission over the Local Coastal Plan dominated the year in news, while tragedy struck one too many times on PCH. Meanwhile, other local city politics were low-key, and the firing of two local Ralphs employees fired up the ire of the community in the Year 2002.

By Arnold G. York/Publisher

January

• The year opened with what was to become the No. 1 news item of the year- the approaching showdown between the City of Malibu and the California Coastal Commission over the proposed Malibu Local Coastal Plan (Malibu LCP), which came before the commission for a vote at its Jan. 10 meeting at the Los Angeles airport. Tensions were running high and Malibu was girding up for a battle.

• The Coastal Commission was considering putting harsh limits about what property owners could do in environmentally sensitive habitat areas (ESHAs), which, by the commission's definition, meant most of Malibu. When the city heard what the Coastal Commission intended, some citizens of Malibu went berserk.

Coastal wanted:

* No guest cottages

* No brush clearance

* No fencing

* No vegetable gardens

* No horses, no barns

* No garbage disposals

And in ESHA buffers (meaning not in it, but just next to an ESHA):

* No rosebushes

* No lighted tennis courts

* No thinning out bushes, or taking out trees

* No building if a property is visible from a scenic highway

• The Malibu Pier renovation moved into a "go" mode when the County of Los Angeles came through with $2.9 million to help complete the final phase of renovation. Combined with $2 million from the state and $700,000 from Proposition A funds, the total renovations will amount to more than $5.5 million. Officials are hoping for a spring 2003 opening date.

• The Malibu Times Dolphin Award winners for the Year 2001 were announced.

Bill and Virginia Armstrong

Cornucopia Farms

Shelly Cox

Robert Hart

Tom Hasse

Zane Meckler

Laura Zahn Rosenthal

Dermot Stoker

Peg Yorkin

• Malibu citizens and dozens of uniformed Little Leaguers lined up at the Coastal Commission hearing to give their views on the proposed Malibu LCP and the potential loss of their ball fields at Bluffs Park. The coastal commissioners were clearly not amused.

• Five candidates decided to run for the Malibu City Council and kicked off their campaigns. They were:

Robert Roy van de Hoek

Beverly Taki

Andy Stern

John Wall

Sharon Barovsky

• In a startling change, Malibu Acting City Manager Katie Lichtig decided to appoint Malibu Senior Planner Drew Purvis as the new planning director and moved former Director Barry Hogan upstairs to work on special projects after many months of differences between Hogan and the Planning Commission

February

• After two years, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge handed down a decision that finally ended a long-simmering dispute about the November 2000 election results. Two competing growth-limiting ballot propositions had gone head-to-head. The court ruled that Proposition N, the one supported by the City Council, which garnered 100 or so more votes than Proposition P (the environmental activists' proposition), was the winner.

• The County of Los Angeles was entertaining the idea of selling its antiquated and decaying Waterworks District 29, which provides water to Malibu, Pepperdine University, Topanga and Sunset Mesa, to a private company.

• Requests for Proposals would be going out soon.

• Solstice Canyon began a major facelift by the U.S. Department of the Interior National Park Service (NPS), which bought the property from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. Aside from a facelift, the NPS is planning to try and reintroduce the endangered steelhead trout to the creek. Late in the year, those same hypothetical steelhead trout sent the NPS before the Malibu City Council to ask it to deny or reduce the proposed 32-room bed and breakfast in to be located adjacent to the Beau Rivage restaurant because it was fearful the project might come too close to the trout.

• Real Estate prices held in 2001 among much fewer sales, according to The Malibu Times real estate guru Rick Wallace. Coming off the year 2000, the busiest year in Malibu real estate history, the number of home sales dipped from 346 to 237. However, prices held, and even rose a bit higher. The mean average price crept up to $1.8 million.

March

• In a series of tragic automobile accidents over a weekend, Pepperdine senior Amy Ecker, 20, was killed while traveling back to the campus after spring break; Seaver College freshman Lindsey Lott was injured in a Malibu Canyon Road accident and airlifted out to UCLA; and Malibu High School student Ryan Malloy, 18, was injured when his vehicle overturned on Corral Canyon Road. In the final outcome of an earlier tragedy from summer 2001, Tarek Tolba, 29, from Santa Monica, was sentenced to six years in prison in connection with a vehicle accident on PCH in which he was allegedly intoxicated. His passenger was killed after being ejected from his car that hit a pole while speeding at 100 mph.

• Pepperdine's basketball teams, both men's and women's, marched into the NCAA Tournament, otherwise known as March Madness, with spectacular records. The women's team finished first in the West Coast Conference and took the WCC title. The men tied for first with Gonzaga University.

• The Ahmanson Ranch project, a controversial 3,050-home, two-golf course project scheduled to be built north of the 101 Freeway near Las Virgenes Road, continued picking up opposition, with celebrities joining Rally to Save Ahmanson Ranch. Ed Masry and Erin Brokovich joined the roster, which already included actor Martin Sheen, producer/director Rob Reiner and a host of L.A. politicians opposing the project.

• The city hires Katie Lichtig as the new city manager after serving as interim manager since the prior summer, following the sudden departure of City Manager Marilyn Leuck after only a couple of months on the job.

April

• Controversy flared around City Council candidate Rob Roy van de Hoek, who was accused of environmental zealotry. A few years earlier, Van de Hoek had been convicted after a jury trial of four counts of vandalism for cutting fences, a paddock and trees in a federal preserve. Van de Hoek claimed the charges were false, and trumped up in retaliation for his having been a whistleblower against bad practices by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

• Many longtime lower Topanga residents started digging in and calling their lawyers to avoid eviction from their homes following the state's purchase of the 1,659 acres along PCH and up into Topanga Canyon from longtime owner L.A. Athletic Club, which will be converted to a state park.

• Political resistance continued building, particularly among the residents of adjacent Los Angeles County, against the long-planned 3,050-home Ahmanson Ranch project, planned in the southern edges of Ventura County. "Sooner or later the freeway is going to fail. The Ahmanson development will just make it happen sooner than later" said a local planning official.

• Incumbent Councilmember Sharon Barovsky and Planning Commission Chair Andy Stern swamped the opposition in the race for the two seats on the Malibu City Council by almost a 2-to-1 margin in a low voter-turnout election. Only 33.2 percent of registered Malibu voters went to the polls.

• Even creation of a Malibu senior citizen center turned out to be controversial within the city, which finally decided to house the center in the new City Hall building, adjacent to the council chambers in a 1,200-square-foot space. An opposition group, led by former Mayor Walt Keller, argued for a different solution-a 4,000-square-foot mobile home to be parked on a piece of school district land next to the equestrian center in West Malibu, which upset the equestrians.

• The City Council elected Jeff Jennings as the new mayor and Ken Kearsley as the mayor pro tem.

• The Malibu Parks and Recreation Commission started pushing to build sports fields on a 15-acre parcel in Trancas Canyon.

"We have 850 children playing AYSO soccer, but the City of Malibu doesn't own one soccer or baseball field," said Parks and Recreation Commissioner Dermot Stoker, who argued for use of the land, which had been used as a ball field in the 1970s and early 1980s.

May

• In the face of a growing budget deficit, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District decided to survey voters' receptiveness to a proposed additional parcel tax (which, it was later revealed, would be an additional $300 per year, per parcel) to cover the anticipated budget shortage.

• Rising rents and an acute shortage of any new commercial space began to take its toll on many old-line Malibu businesses like John's Garden, which has been in the Malibu Country Mart for 28 years. Its owners were fearful they might be forced out by rising costs. Later in the year they finally worked it out so they could go into the New Year smaller, and a little trimmer, but here to stay.

• Malibu residents clashed over the state's vision for a new plan for what it would call the Malibu Lagoon State Beach. The plans included taking Bluffs Park and removing the ball fields. State Department of Parks and Recreation Angeles District Superintendent Russ Guiney said, "As you drive up to Bluffs Park the one thing we want people to see is that expanse (of the coast), and right now we see backstops." Locals said it was absurd to tear up the fields just to reduplicate them at a cost estimated at $2.6 million.

• The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy's (SMMC) plan to turn the old Barbra Streisand home, in the very back of Ramirez Canyon, into a commercial banquet facility to raise money was temporarily thwarted by a legal victory by the City of Malibu in the Court of Appeals. The court said that it looked like a commercial facility, and the conservancy had to first go to the city for a permit, which the SMMC had maintained it was not required to do.

Score one for the city, but the fight isn't over.

June

Malibu High School was repeatedly vandalized during and after the Memorial Day weekend, leaving windows smashed, classrooms ransacked and derogatory messages written on administrators' doors. "Almost every kid I talked to is sincerely appalled. Nobody hates MHS that bad," said the school's security officer, Milton Greene.

• Lawyer Deirde Roney and dentist-turned-inventor Robert Adler were appointed to the Planning Commission, joining new Chair Richard Carrigan, Vice Chair David Fox and Commissioner Ed Lipnick.

• The not so terribly popular California Coastal commissioners came to Malibu, some for the first time, to take a bus ride around and get a first-hand look at the city and its habitats, including the controversial ball fields at Bluffs Park. In inimitable Malibu style, picketers met them although they turned out to be friendlier than not.

• Former Planning Commission-er Ted Vaill decided to test the oft-repeated charges that Malibu beaches were not accessible and, over a couple of Saturdays, walked the 21.5-mile coastline to prove that, in fact, all of Malibu's beaches could be traversed on foot, provided you had the stamina.

• In a unanimous vote, the City Council turned its thumbs down on an MTV proposal to tape a reality show, "Tough Enough," for 60 days last summer at a home on Broad Beach. The Municipal Code restricts filming to 14 days, and the council apparently didn't want a repeat of the complaints of the previous season over long-term beach shoots.

July

The Planning Commission considered whether it should change its rules to cut back on the number of appeals, especially over esthetics. "It's like getting a marriage license and someone protests it, saying, 'I don't like your fianc. She's ugly' " said Planning Commissioner Ed Lipnick. On balance, the commission decided to stick with the old system anyway, ugly or not.

• The City of Malibu handed back its old city hall to the Sheriff's Department and moved into its new quarters in the large white building on Stewart Ranch Road, which had formerly been the home of Miramar Publications and later, Primetime Media.

"The new City Hall won't have rats. We will miss those," said Councilmember Sharon Barovsky, referring to the not infrequent rat sightings in the old building.

• The California Coastal Commission held its next-to-last hearing on the proposed Malibu Local Coastal Plan, and, although the city had gained some minor ground in negotiations with the commission, there were still basic areas in which they remained widely apart. Most important, the Coastal Commission still intended to turn most of Malibu into an ESHA, or an ESHA buffer, because of the presence of a common, flammable weed called coastal sage. There was one more Coastal Commission hearing to go before the legislatively mandated, drop-dead date of Sept. 15 for certification of the plan.

• The school district sounded a warning that unless the proposed parcel tax, which was set for the November ballot, passed by the necessary two-thirds vote, programs like music, art, advanced placement and nursing would go because the district would be forced to cut $5.8 million out of its budget.

• In a 4-1 vote, the Malibu City Council turned down a variance to allow the building of a road through more than a quarter-mile of city territory on Sweetwater Mesa, which would have enabled Brian Sweeney to access his undeveloped mountain property. Either way, whether the city agreed with some of the neighbors who wanted to block it or the developer who wanted to build it, everyone understood this was going to end up in court.

• Despite the opposition of two of the most powerful lobbies in America-the automobile and oil industry lobbies-the Legislature passed and the governor signed Assemblymember Fran Pavley's precedent-setting vehicle emissions bill, which limited certain vehicle emissions to combat global warming.

August

• In the relentless battle to retain the Little League fields at Bluffs Park, a 20-year-old Superior Court-approved settlement agreement between the state and the Little Leaguers had come out from behind file cabinets and has reraised the question as to whether Bluffs Park was to be a permanent home for the Little League. League officials said, "Yes," but state park officials disagree. A former governor's chief of staff who helped negotiate the settlement remained mum. His name-Gov. Gray Davis.

• The average home price in Malibu reached $2 million Rick Wallace reported. The median price of a sale has also moved upward and reached $1.375 million, the highest ever in Malibu.

• The Trout Coalition called for the removal of the 102-foot high, 140-foot wide Rindge Dam, which is located several miles up Malibu Creek. It was originally erected in 1924 to provide an agricultural water supply. Critics charged that spending $40 million to $52 million on a chance the dam removal might restore a run of approximately 50 steelhead trout is ridiculous, but the Army Corp of Engineers is still moving ahead with a $2.1 million feasibility study.

• In a rare victory in front of the board of Santa Monica-Malibu School District, parents were assured that they would be given top priority if their children wanted to transfer to another school within the district. Previously, children from outside the district had been given priority over local children to encourage outsiders to come in, and with hope to relieve some of the financial strain on the district with the money from the extra students.

• The weeklong gala of the Third Malibu Film Festival packed the New Malibu Theater the entire week, and festivities kicked off at a large bash at the castle high on a hill above the Civic Center, hosted by sponsor Lily Lawrence. Actor Tony Danza MC'd the awards ceremony at Taverna Tony's Restaurant. The event had grown from the previous year, and featured many more entries from young filmmakers from around the world.

September

• Brad Norris of Malibu Health and Fitness, a prominent amateur chef, won three awards for his Baja Chicken Chili for the second year in a row at the Malibu Chili Cook-Off.

• Thomas Burnett Jr., a 1995 graduate of the Pepperdine Business School, was honored posthumously on the first anniversary of Sept. 11 for his and other passengers' courage in attempting to wrest control of Flight 93 from terrorists, and ultimately thwarting what many thought was their goal to crash into the White House.

During that fateful flight, Burnett spoke to his wife on his cell phone, learned of the other crashes and, in his last conversation with his wife, said he and the other passengers had decided to definitely try and do something.

• It was down to the wire in the battle between the California Coastal Commission and the City of Malibu over the Malibu LCP. Ironically enough, on Friday the 13th of September, two days before the final deadline mandated by the Legislature in Assembly Bill 988, and before a very sizable and unhappy Malibu contingent, the commission passed a plan, 10-1, that pleased very few people. Malibu insiders saw the plan as an attempt to take over our town by a group of enviro-extremists, aided by the Coastal Commission bureaucracy.

• Actor Nick Nolte, a longtime Malibu resident who has fought many battles with alcohol, was arrested on Pacific Coast Highway near Kanan Dume Road in the early afternoon for allegedly driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

October

• San Diego resident Mark Osborne, 33, in Malibu to attend the funeral of his father-in-law, Carl Randall, was tragically killed when a motorist traveling eastbound on Pacific Coast Highway near Las Flores Beach allegedly lost control of her vehicle and struck him while he was hosing off the area in front of the Randall home on PCH. Mark Osborne, 33, was the husband of Julie Randall, and the son-in-law of Carl, 83, a longtime Malibu resident and activist, and Carol Randall.

• The proposed Malibu Bay Company Development Agreement, covers the potential development of about one-half of the acreage in the Civic Center area, including the Chili Cook-Off site and some surrounding properties over a 10-year period. The MBC intends to give to the city a large parcel on PCH in Point Dume for recreation and a community center, and a series of parcels in the Trancas Canyon Area, intended for both development and open space. The city began the first of a number of public hearings on the deal, enroute to a final decision by the Planning Commission, the City Council and, ultimately, Malibu voters.

• The Coastal Commission's recently approved, and highly unpopular, Malibu LCP was thrown into an uncertain legal morass when a group of Malibu citizens presented initiative petitions to the city clerk bearing the signature of 2,600-plus Malibu registered voters demanding the city hold a referendum election on the LCP.

• Malibu City Attorney Christi Hogin informed the council that once those petitions were filed, the implementation of Malibu LCP was immediately halted. Peter Douglas, executive director of the California Coastal Commission, took exception to that advice and said, "I think that the residents were sincere and genuinely thought that they were doing something that would have legal force and effect, but they got bad advice."

• In the ongoing battle between the city and the Coastal Commission over the Malibu LCP, the city struck first and filed a lawsuit to try and get a quick determination from the court as to whether the filing of the 2,600-signature initiative petition effectively has stopped the implementation of the LCP, or whether it should be ignored as the Coastal Commission attorneys and staff have maintained. The first hearings in the case will be probably heard in early January 2003, and until then, all coastal permit processing appears to be in limbo.

November

• Malibu went to the polls in November amidst an ocean of apathetic voters, many turned off by their feelings about their limited choices for governor. Neither Gray Davis nor Bill Simon had generated any excitement in Malibu, as was the case throughout most of the state. In the low voter turnout election, Proposition EE, the proposed local $300 per year educational parcel tax, went down to narrow defeat, garnering more than 61 percent of voter support, but unable to reach the magic number of 66 2/3 percent necessary for passage.

• A victory by the City of Malibu in the Court of Appeals earlier in the year, which effectively blocked the use of the Streisand Center in Ramirez Canyon as a commercial banquet facility, was mysteriously snatched out of the city's hands recently. Assembly Bill 2891, a piece of legislation carried by Assemblymember Paul Koretz (D-West Hollywood), and what some observers described as a stealth bill, passed through the Legislature and appeared to reverse the Court of Appeals' decision without ever mentioning it by name or indicating it was reversing the decision. Both Malibu representatives, Sen. Sheila Kuehl and Assemblymember Fran Pavley, deny having any prior knowledge of the bill, which apparently just sort of snuck through without anyone noticing it.

• Malibu Attorney Sam Birenbaum, who has been involved in an ongoing series of legal problems over the last few years, pled no contest to two felony counts of grand theft for allegedly stealing more than $120,000 from clients. He will do jail time, said the deputy district attorney.

• The growing state budget crisis struck the Santa Monica-Malibu School District-the school board approved $1.5 million in budget cuts, effective immediately, to try and help cover the growing deficit facing the district. Additional cuts are expected as the reality of the $30 billion-plus state budget deficit begins to be felt.

December

• Ralphs summarily fired two longtime clerks, Harry McDermott and Nancy Cicatelli, because they failed to check the IDs of three Pepperdine students who were buying beer at the store on the weekend before Thanksgiving. They were observed by an investigator for the Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC), who was also in line. Their firing stirred a storm of protest among Malibu citizenry because many felt the firing unfair since the clerks knew the students, who had phony IDs showing they were 21, and had carded them on previous occasions.

• Former Planning Commission Chair Ed Lipnick, a 40-year resident of Malibu and a political activist, who courageously continued to serve on the commission almost to the very end of his life, died after a long battle with cancer.

• The projected budget deficit for the Santa Monica-Malibu School District continued to grow, as the numbers coming from Sacramento appeared to worsen with each passing day. Superintendent John Deasy now projected the total revenue loss over the next year or so might reach $11 million for the district.

• Sara Wan of Malibu, the highly controversial California Coastal Commission chair for the past three years, was ousted from her position after an acrimonious series of battles at the commission, in which Wan had charged in the press that the governor and the speaker were working behind the scenes to oust her.

• The Ventura County Board of Supervisors dug in their heels, brushed aside the objections by the County of Los Angeles, and many other elected officials, and in a 4-1 vote, certified the controversial supplemental environmental impact report for the Ahmanson Ranch Project to be built in a corner of Ventura County, bordering Los Angeles County.

• And Year 2002 ended!