Land-Use War, Malibu Style

This isn’t one of those development stories with an easy bad guy.

There is no big-box retailer looking to grab a corner of Main Street; no mega homebuilder trying to pave a mountainside.

Instead, this is a feud that pits blind kids against a rare fish in a gorgeous canyon of giant oaks and sycamores high above the beach near Malibu.

On one side of the canyon is the Foundation for the Junior Blind, which is hoping to renovate and expand its longtime summer camp. On the other side is neighbor Jeremy Joe Kronsberg, a retired screenwriter and director who calls the project a “blueprint for environmental ruin.” Kronsberg lives not in Malibu luxury but in a mobile home with his wife, Lynne, an artist. He hunts for wild mushrooms and ponders the comings and goings of coyotes, bobcats and red-shouldered hawks.

Between the camp and the Kronsbergs runs the Arroyo Sequit, one of the last pristine streams left in Southern California, a place where steelhead trout still live.

Kronsberg says that if the Foundation for the Junior Blind gets Los Angeles County approval for the $20-million project, scores of oaks and sycamores along the creek will be cut down to make way for a camp road. The steelhead, an endangered species with fewer than 200 adults in streams countywide, could be driven away.

The foundation paints Kronsberg, who wrote “Every Which Way But Loose” and directed “Going Ape” in the early 1980s, as a phony Thoreau who cares only about protecting his little own paradise. He is, the foundation says, merely using the trees and fish to oppose a long overdue camp renovation that would include plenty of environmental safeguards.

That the backyard dispute has engaged two of the most powerful law firms in California -- Latham & Watkins for the foundation, Lavely & Singer (Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s counsel) for the Kronsbergs -- should come as no surprise. This is Malibu, after all, a place where only the wealthy can own a slice of nature and even the smallest development fights can become epic.

Latham & Watkins, led by land use power broker George Mihlsten, is accustomed to prevailing on such big projects as Playa Vista. But Mihlsten, who also sits on the foundation’s board, faces no easy battle. For one thing, the camp must meet new fire safety standards to expand, and that means doubling the narrow access road off Mulholland Drive.

The wider road would not only traverse the Kronsbergs’ property -- no small complication -- but it also would take out at least three dozen of their oak trees, requiring a special county permit.

Because the canopy nourishes the Arroyo Sequit and provides an ideal habitat for the steelhead, several state agencies, including the Department of Fish and Game, express misgivings about the project.

Federal agencies overseeing the effect on the steelhead won’t comment until the environmental impact report is completed this summer, but they say the project will probably need a federal permit.

But Mihlsten and his associates are hardly deterred. They tried -- and failed -- to get the county to use eminent domain as a way of forcing the Kronsbergs off their 10 acres, records show. Now they’re suing the Kronsbergs. The lawsuit claims that the road and strip of trees, although technically on the Kronsbergs’ property, also belong to the camp after years of shared use.

“The foundation is hiding behind the blind kids to steal my land and chop down my oaks,” said Kronsberg, a 67-year-old bodybuilding buff who still pumps iron in an old stone cabin beside the creek. “They want to expand the camp and turn it into a cash cow.”

Foundation president Bob Ralls believes the camp has history on its side.

Set down amid 40 acres of open canyon, the cabins, dining hall, swimming pool, archery range, horse trails, petting zoo and ball fields were built by civic groups beginning in the late 1950s. The last major addition was more than 30 years ago.

Ralls is confident the Board of Supervisors will eventually approve the project. “We were here at least 24 years before the neighbor came,” he said. “Over 25,000 blind kids and youth have been through this camp. All we’re talking about is rejuvenating the camp for the next 50 years of serving blind children.”

In the beginning, Camp Bloomfield and the Kronsbergs managed to coexist more or less in peace. They shared the quarter-mile access road without tussle. When the campers needed an obstacle course, Kronsberg let them use his meadow. On movie nights, he provided a projector and reel and showed his first hit feature, “Every Which Way But Loose,” starring Clint Eastwood as a barroom brawler with an orangutan sidekick.

Kronsberg said his relationship with the foundation started to sour in the early 1980s. That’s when the foundation, which offers the camp free to blind and partially sighted children, began doing what other camps in the Santa Monica Mountains do: renting the facility to outside groups.

At first, the renters belonged to area churches and temples. Then in the late 1980s, the Conejo Valley School District began renting the camp. From February through May, hundreds of students and science teachers trek up to the canyon for weekly nature camps.

Before long, a 10-week camp for blind and partially sighted kids and their parents had turned into a nine-month facility that serves a greater number of children who are not blind.

“A summer camp for blind kids is a good thing,” Kronsberg said. “But Camp Bloomfield is no longer just that. Cars, buses, septic tank trucks and semitrailers delivering milk and food. Loudspeakers and music blaring at 7 a.m., schoolkids marching. It’s week in and week out.”

Foundation supporters acknowledge that the original county permit in 1972 authorized a two-month summer camp for blind youths. But foundation president Ralls said the foundation also considers itself part of the larger community.

“What’s wrong with the schools using this camp as an outdoor classroom? We believe it’s a public facility,” he said.

In a recent tour of the camp, Ralls drove a gas-powered golf cart past wood and cinderblock buildings that still looked sturdy but showed 45 years of wear and tear. Bathrooms need to be upgraded, he said. So do the sewer and water systems. It’s one thing for the camp to be rustic, another for it to be broken down.

The foundation, he said, is committed to making the project environmentally friendly. The first plan by Brenda Levin, the architect hired to restore Los Angeles City Hall and the Griffith Observatory, called for doubling the building space. Her revised plan envisions a more modest expansion, from the current 28,000 square feet to 44,000. That would include two new lodges, one for girls and one for staff, and renovations to the dining hall, boys’ cabins and infrastructure, leaving 33 acres in a natural state.

“The [first] plan was appropriately criticized. We said, ‘You’re right’ and made the changes,” Levin said. “But we’re also doing things to improve the environment that no one asked us to do, such as getting rid of asphalt and putting in a more permeable surface.”

As Ralls drove across one of two bridges that span the Arroyo Sequit, it was easy to glimpse the damage done to the creek in past decades. Camp workers, fearing erosion, had poured thousands of tons of stone and aggregate on the banks. In some places, the concrete had narrowed the channel to a few feet, altering the water’s course and making it difficult for the steelhead to spawn.

Ralls said the concrete was an unsightly shortcut done before he became foundation president in 1985. Unfortunately, the camp, which operates on donations, could not afford the millions of dollars to undo the damage, he said.

But Kronsberg’s attorney, Paul Berra of Lavely & Singer, said that if the foundation were a true steward of the land, it would find a way to beautify the camp without building new structures. The money saved could help restore the creek.

By filing for even a single electrical permit, the camp will trigger a host of modern-day requirements. A third bridge over the creek, wide enough for two firetrucks, would have to be built. And then there remains the contentious issue of the narrow entrance road and strip of woodlands on the Kronsbergs’ property.

The county requires a 20-foot-wide minimum road for firetruck access. But parts of the road are no more than 8 feet wide, squeezed tight by the creek and a steep tree-studded hillside. If the foundation can persuade the judge that land belonging to the Kronsbergs also belongs to the camp, it plans to cut down the trees for a wider road that would require reinforcements.

Even so, fire officials aren’t sure the road can be widened enough.

“We don’t like deviating from the 20-foot-wide minimum,” said Mark Nelson, a county Fire Department battalion chief who heads the land development unit. “We might choke down to 15 feet if it’s just a small section of road. But I don’t see us going down any smaller.”

Both sides are finding supporters where they can. In the camp’s corner are Andy Stern, Malibu’s vice mayor, and Joe Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

“When it comes right down to it,” Edmiston said, “I’m willing to live with some minor degradation of steelhead habitat to allow blind kids to enjoy those mountains.”

Kronsberg’s concerns are echoed, in part, by county planners, the local Sierra Club and state biologists whose agencies use the Arroyo Sequit as a reference stream.

“We’re talking about the most pristine stream left in all of Southern California that runs to the ocean,” said Suzanne Goode, a senior resource ecologist with the California State Parks Angeles District. “It’s the barometer of how streams should run, how clean their water could be. This project would impose an unacceptable risk to that.”

As the fight heads to an April court date, the case already has seen a number of interesting disclosures. Last year, the foundation stated in court filings that the Fire Department had given “preliminary approval” to a proposed road that fell short of the 20-foot-wide standard. But several fire officials later testified in depositions that they had never seen the foundation’s road plan and gave no such approval.

Board of Supervisor records, subpoenaed by Berra, show that the foundation enjoyed access to Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and his staff that the Kronsbergs did not. In one e-mail dated March 1, 2004, architect Levin wrote to the supervisor to describe how she had discussed the camp project at a social affair with Yaroslavsky’s wife, Barbara, and county Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen.

Special access or not, Mihlsten said, the county has yet to give the foundation a single break. “We’ve been doing this for three years, and we’re not even out of the gate. We’ve had to hire 12 consultants -- for the oaks, the road, the water, the sewer. This is all to remodel an existing camp for blind children. We’re not talking about a liquor store here.”

Kronsberg, standing stubbornly in his forest, surrounded by “No trespassing” signs, his eyes swollen with poison oak, believes he holds the ultimate card. Even if the judge rules that the camp has a right to his land, the foundation won’t be able to cut down a single oak without his signature.

“And they’re not going to get it,” he vowed.