Planning Director Craig Ewing submitted his resignation to the city effective Feb. 11, giving up the post he has held since Jan. 4, 1998. He has accepted the position of community development director for the Northern California city of Lafayette.

Ewing, who spent nine years as planning director for the city of La Canada-Flintridge, said he was drawn to Malibu by the opportunity to take on the challenge of a new city’s planning needs. “It’s a beautiful setting in which to work, along the coast, but with that goes the higher responsibility of protection, preservation and regulation,” he said during his first week in Malibu.

When Ewing took on the job, he said he recognized the city faced tough issues concerning the city’s undeveloped land, and that there were opposing views on the need to expand the city’s job base and the broadly shared perspective that Malibu should remain a residential community. “We have pressures for development that are going to test a lot of those views, and we’re going to have to come up with a single voice,” he said. “These are tough issues because they touch on emotional issues for people — the use of their land.”

Ewing said Tuesday, “The issues are still emotional, most are still unresolved, and I don’t think we came up with a single voice. After two years and a month, it is with some regret that we weren’t able to accomplish more.”

During his tenure with the city, Ewing worked on a number of projects and programs, including completion of a draft Local Coastal Program Land Use Plan, which is now before the California Coastal Commission staff for review. A formal submittal will come later this year.

His draft Hillside Management Plan was sent to the City Council, but council members didn’t support it, and instead formed a new committee of architects and engineers to review it.

“The draft zoning ordinance is still a good ways off,” Ewing said. “We made a number of specific changes to the Interim Zoning Ordinance regarding front setbacks, institutional uses, parking standards and modifications of variances.”

Ewing also drafted a “how-to” planning procedures book for the public. “It went to the council in December, but they have not given approval to distribute it,” he said.

The draft wetlands delineation report has been submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers for review. “We’re still waiting to hear from them on that,” Ewing said.

The Civic Center Specific Plan was finished and submitted to the City Council by contract planners Crawford, Multari and Star after months of work with a citizens group, but the council dumped that too.

“I think the report probably was salvageable, but it allowed too much density for what the community would support,” Ewing said. “It was submitted right at the time of the last election, and I think there was a desire by the new council to distance itself from that.”

Ewing said one of the achievements of which he’s most proud is the people he hired to staff the planning department. “I am the longest-serving employee in the department. We had a complete turnover. They are wonderful people, hard working, intelligent, and they have good hearts. They work well together, and while the city and I don’t agree on a lot of the rules, I walk away knowing the department is well staffed with really fine people.”

In his new position with Lafayette, Ewing will be responsible for planning, city engineering and public works. “New responsibilities for me. The city is a residential community, mostly all single-family, and is semirural. They have taken a new interest in their downtown commercial area, and we have a multimillion dollar street-improvement project that includes building a small parking structure, which has to be designed, and a new library. It should be a lot of fun. And I found a place to live in San Francisco, an apartment on Yerba Buena Island with a spectacular view.”

City Manager Harry Peacock has not announced an interim replacement for Ewing; however, recruitment for a permanent planning director is underway.

The city’s previous planning directors had been frustrated in their efforts to accomplish the same goals while working with citizen groups on the thorny issues of formulating the city’s General Plan, Interim Zoning Ordinance and the Civic Center Specific Plan, along with state mandates for housing elements, environmental protection and public access to beaches.

Bob Benard, the city’s first planning director, resigned after a grueling few years to take a position with the city of Long Beach. Joyce Parker resigned in favor of Oxnard (she is now with Agoura Hills) shortly after former City Manager David Carmany’s forced resignation allowed him to take a less-contentious post with the city of Pacifica. Vince Bertoni, who filled the interim post before Ewing arrived, went to the city of Santa Clarita.

The auditorium at Hughes Research Laboratories was packed, a change from the normally sparse attendance, for Monday night’s City Council meeting. Most of the audience, many bringing placards, came to protest what they see as heavy-handed code enforcement by the city.

Many came to see how the council would resolve the dispute between beachside neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Gil Segel and Mr. Charles Perez.

And, finally, members of the Parks and Recreation Commission came to protest lack of public consultation in hiring the parks and recreation director.

In the marathon meeting lasting until 11:30 p.m., the council:

• Voted 5-0 to schedule a meeting as soon as possible on the code enforcement issue.

• Heard that litigation between the city and the California Coastal Commission over parking at the Point Dume headlands had been settled.

• Unanimously approved the employment agreement with Paul Adams for position of Parks and Recreation Director;

• Voted 3-2 to hire a consulting team to prepare a flood mitigation assistance program. Mayor Pro Tem Harry Barovsky and Councilmembers Joan House and Tom Hasse sided with staff in choosing a consultant who might know more about Federal Emergency Management Agency practices. Mayor Carolyn Van Horn and Councilman Walt Keller preferred another consultant, whose fee was $37,000 cheaper and whose views on the Civic Center more closely matched their own.

• Unanimously approved the Planning Commission decision that the deck stringline rule applies to swimming pools.

• Voted 3-2 (Barovsky and House against) to refer a decision on the Perez/Segel dispute back to the Planning Commission

Code enforcement

After hearing nearly two hours of public testimony, and unable to take action on the comments until the issue was “agendized,” the council agreed to schedule a meeting devoted to code enforcement as soon as possible. Paul Major asked it to consider: grandfathering structures built prior to cityhood, an immediate temporary moratorium on noncritical health or safety conditions, and the creation of a “Grandfathering Task Force” to work with the council-appointed architects and engineers committee reviewing the hillside ordinance.

As they had last month, residents told the council city staff has engaged in selective code enforcement against modest-income, long-term residents by citing unpermitted guest houses and other structures.

As a result, residents say they are being treated like criminals for the first time in their lives. They fear and resent the government they thought would “grandfather” the structures built before incorporation but instead insists they be brought up to code standards or be demolished.

“Many residents so fear retaliation that they don’t speak out,” said Deborah Purucker. “Thomas Jefferson told us we had inalienable rights, that government derives its powers from the consent of the governed. No government should create an environment that makes people feel like criminals in their own homes.”

Residents Jim Johnson and Gary Winikott said Malibu’s original settlers were people of modest means, such as firefighters or school teachers, who were greatly involved in volunteerism. The city’s code enforcement policy is turning neighbor against neighbor and the city into an area of mansionization, forcing long-term residents out.

“Many people could not afford to live here today,” said Johnson. “You are creating fear, anger and resentment. You are turning neighbor against neighbor.”

“You don’t see Johnny Carson or Barbra Streisand when it comes to helping with natural disasters,” said Winikott. “Every house going in now is big. We are pushing out the normal people.”

Point Dume parking

The city announced it approved two related agreements to resolve a long-term dispute with the California Coastal Commission over access to the Point Dume State Park.

A settlement agreement resolves pending litigation. The settlement agreement is linked to a Joint Project Agreement between the State Parks department and the city for managing natural resources and traffic at the park and at Point Dume State Beach, said City Manager Harry Peacock.

If the Coastal Commission had been successful in the litigation, which arose from its 1997 Cease and Desist Order about boulders and “No Parking” signs along Birdview Avenue and Cliffside Drive, the city might have been liable for $6,000 a day in administrative fines.

Deck stringline rule

The council faced two issues about the “stringline” test, a rule of thumb for determining how far seaward homes and decks may project toward the beach. It agreed unanimously with the staff determination the deck stringline applies to swimming pools.

Then the council had to decide whether that definition would apply to resolve a yearlong dispute between the Segels and Perez (and the Planning Commission and planning director) over Perez’s plans to remodel his house and build a pool on the deck.

Planning Director Craig Ewing had determined the stringline, the last part of planning clearance needed for Perez to build a pool on his deck, in October. The Segels, Perez’s neighbor on the east, filed an appeal.

In November, the Planning Commission upheld the Segel appeal, basing its decision on three factors: the Coastal Commission had a more restrictive guideline, an offer to dedicate coastal access by the prior owner of Perez’s property overlaps the stringline area, and the information on Perez’s site plan might not have been accurate.

Motions by Barovsky to uphold Ewing and by Keller to uphold the Planning Commission failed. Although Hasse crafted a third description of a stringline, based on the definition the council had just approved and which would have allowed Perez to build the pool, his colleagues decided to let the Planning Commission make the decision.

Hiring practices

Parks and Recreation Commissioners Pat Greenwood, Ted Vaill and Sam Hall Kaplan, as well as former Parks and Recreation Study Group Member Marissa Coughlin said the commission should have been consulted before the city hired Paul Adams as the new Parks and Recreation director.

They wanted to look outside the department (Adams has been a city recreation supervisor for several years) for someone who would have more intergovernmental agency experience.

Referring to the agreement among the city, Coastal Commission and State Parks department, and recreation advocate Kristin Reynolds’ submission of reports on land use and public opinion on a Parks Master Plan, Coughlin said, “We need to achieve what Kristin Reynolds did, to give the city Parks and Recreation department the same credibility. We need someone with experience in intergovernmental relationships.”

“I thought open recruitment was part of public policy,” Greenwood said.

A committee charged with reviewing the City Council’s proposed ordinance on hillsides sees the mapping approach as a way out of the minefield of political decisions council members make using the lot-by-lot approach.

Architects say the ordinances give an immense amount of discretionary power to the City Council to control community character. Council members must decide which constituency to please.

For example, at the last City Council meeting, council members postponed a decision on Barbra Streisand’s home remodeling plans because they did not know whether to support her or her neighbors. Council members were faced with accusations of either selective enforcement for celebrities or reverse discrimination against celebrities.

The Architects and Engineers Committee, comprising local architects Michael Barsocchini, Ed Niles and Richard Sol, as well as Woodland Hills civil engineer David Weiss and Santa Monica landscape architect Marny Randall, will recommend the council buy a geographic information mapping system costing $175,000 – $300,000.

The committee made its decision last week, after hearing from Planning Director Craig Ewing that he has resigned effective Feb. 11 and that the council is asking for community input on two-year budget priorities by the end of this month. The maps would also be useful to the city consultant refining the Interim Zoning Ordinance, Ewing said. Barsocchini noted it is hard for someone to visualize slope. He said he took Planning Commissioner Charleen Kabrin to a site on Point Dume and asked if she thought it was steep. She said it was, but a property owner might not. “That’s politicizing,” Barsocchini said.

Ewing is to fashion a resolution calling for a basic system of maps showing topography, property lines and roadways, estimated to cost $175,000. Optional overlay maps include zoning districts, the mean high tide line, landslides, infrastructure such as District 29 water mains, environmentally sensitive habitat areas (ESHAs) and archeological sites.

Ewing said the mapping system could be the basis of a permit tracking system costing about $50,000. People could look on the Internet for “tags” of all the permits on their property. Then they would know where they would have to go to resolve the issue.

“The base map system thrashes out lots of information. It will make like easier for everyone,” Niles said.

ESHAs were high on the option list because of the amount of time the city’s biologist, Marti Witter, has to spend locating them. “I’ve learned to ask about them,” Randall said. “If you’re looking on the ground, you don’t know if you have an issue.”

The committee was created last October because the council had rejected the Planning Commission’s year-long effort to fashion an ordinance regulating the design of new homes and remodels, after residents complained the hills were sprouting gargantuan eyesores.

The commission had trouble reaching consensus on how steep a slope to set as the threshold for regulation until the staff proposed extending the design regulations to all proposed homes and remodels over 18 feet tall, as well as those planned for hillside slopes greater than 33 percent. That recommendation also grants the Planning Commission expansive new powers to review housing projects.

“It is a tool for determining the future,” Niles said about the mapping system. Noting the number of lawsuits against Realtors, Niles said. “Once a property is on a map, it forces the city to respond, instead of having to make political decisions.” The city of Agoura Hills has a topographical map with everything on it, “not because they are so nice, but because they want to protect themselves,” Niles said.

Ramirez Canyon residents and city officials descended on the California Coastal Commission en masse last Thursday, asking it to deny the new application that would allow a highly intensified commercial use of the facility formerly known as the Streisand Center.

After two hours of public testimony, the commissioners continued a decision until April.

An October application by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy had been continued to allow its modification. The conservancy refiled in December, requesting a more intensive use of the facility.

The secluded, wooded, residential property, which includes a creek designated as an environmentally sensitive habitat area, was donated to the conservancy in 1993 by Barbra Streisand, with the understanding that it be used as an environmental studies think tank. Streisand’s representative at the commission meeting said she was opposed to this project, and she in fact had her name removed from the center. [See Letters to the Editor, A4.]

Residents who filled a hotel ballroom said intense use of the center for fund-raising by the cash-strapped conservancy is severely compromising the fragile environment of the canyon and creating traffic and public safety issues on the narrow, privately owned road.

Rick Cappell, a canyon resident and real estate developer who has five children, said, “If I were to come before you as a developer and suggest these conditions on residential land, you would put me in a strait jacket. This is a small residential community with a very inadequate road. There is an inordinate amount of traffic in an area where children are playing. There is a potential for overuse of the septic system, leading to pollution of the creek where our children are playing and our animals are drinking.”

In the past, the conservancy was reluctant to even come before the Coastal Commission with an application, and the Coastal Commission was apparently equally reluctant to take legal action against a sister state agency. The conservancy was using the facility for offices and for some commercial events long before it made its coastal application. In October, the conservancy finally applied to the commission for “after-the-fact” approval to convert the five single-family residences into offices and to operate a commercial enterprise on the property.

Area homeowners were willing, according to their news releases, to accept recommendations made by the Coastal Commission staff as a result of concerns over attracting “dense populations of commercial visitors to a site located at the end of a relatively narrow, winding road.” The earlier restrictions on commercial activities included: restricting all functions to 40 participants or less, no more than 72 such events annually, requiring the conservancy to transport guests in no more than seven vans to the site from private offsite parking (excluding the Winding Way Trailhead lot), improving the septic systems and submitting a revised plan for the adequate, immediate evacuation of all assembled guests.

The conservancy then exercised its one-time right to postpone the scheduled November hearing and submit an amended application.

Its December application asks for much more. It wants to convert the property into a public park (Ramirez Canyon Park), the right to hold year-round, small (40 guests or less) events from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., 365 commercial special events (with 150-200 participants), and 260 canyon and guided tours (up to 40 participants).

Another major difference between the two applications is public access.

The October application did not allow general public access to the gated site, nor any public parking or trails with access to nearby National Parks Service lands, staff says. The December application proposes free “interpretive” trails and recreational facilities geared to “disabled and elder groups in conjunction with the conservancy’s public outreach activities.”

Homeowner and attorney Mindy Sheps said, “We’re for public access and information, not commercial use.”

Mayor Carolyn Van Horn, referring to a 1993 promise by conservancy Executive Director Joseph Edmiston of no “public use” of ingress and egress, said, “I thought [the property] would never be dedicated for park purposes. I think it is important that this was the basis of how it would be used.”

Staff analyst Mary Nichols told the audience staff recommended approval because of the added public access component, a Dec. 15 meeting with state and county fire officials, and a Jan. 10 “approval in concept” by county Fire Chief Jim Jordan of an emergency access, onsite parking and “best management practices” plan. Additional problems would be addressed by special conditions.

“I think it is well understood that the residential septic system was not designed for groups of 200,” she said.

George Hoffman, a 28-year resident, said he has seen several fires in the area, notably one in 1982 that burned down to Paradise Cove. “The fire department will not come in until the firestorm has passed,” he said. Even when they do come, people will not be able to get out because it is difficult to get past a firetruck. “Knowing the limited access of that street, are you prepared to accept the risk for citizens if such a disaster occurs?” Responding to a commissioner’s question about the land’s legal status, commission Executive Director Peter Douglas said it is public property owned by the state but not run by the parks department. The conservancy is bound by its charter.

“This has the potential for being a wonderful setting and a wonderful addition to education, but we have to consider the residents who have lived here a long time,” he said.

One commissioner characterized the December proposal, with its 11 special conditions, a “draft.”