Malibu City Council sues California Coastal Commission*

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Stay tuned for a story in Thursday’s paper about the Malibu City Council’s lawsuit against the California Coastal Commission and its executive director, Peter Douglas, because he supported allowing review of an application by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy that allows camping and other activities.

To take advantage of the spaciousness of a blog, a more contextual explanation of the story is included below. But never fear, small tidbits will still be saved for the paper, so check the link at the bottom when it goes live.

Filing of the suit, approved in a unanimous council vote this week, stems from the conservancy’s effort to amend the city’s local coastal program to continue allowing overnight camping, the creation of trail heads, trail linkage and other uses on certain public parkland areas in Malibu. The local coastal program is essentially a planning guide with rules to protect an area’s resources and govern its development.

But Malibu officials say the conservancy’s plan does not take into account concerns about fire safety and is an attempt to leapfrog the city’s interests. Last year’s Corral Canyon fire was believed to have been sparked by an illegal late-night campfire.

The amendment provides for cold camping without a fire but does allow the use of a burner ‘so at least you can cook your soup,’ said conservancy chief staff council Laurie Collins. The conservancy and its sister agency, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, were named as parties in the suit.

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After an earlier attempt to work with the city on a local coastal program amendment failed, Collins said, the conservancy submitted a program amendment directly to the Coastal Commission in April. Douglas approved it as eligible for consideration because it met ‘public needs greater than’ Malibu’s as stated in the Coastal Act, he said.

The suit argues that Douglas had no authority to accept the conservancy’s plan.

Douglas accepted the program amendment under a rarely used ‘override procedure’ in the state’s Coastal Act that can be used to try to approve a public works project or energy facility at the Coastal Commission level when the local government does not agree.

‘The Coastal Act clearly provides for this procedure when local parochial interests are used to trump greater-than-local and, in this case, I think, regional and even statewide public interests,’ said Douglas, who helped author the act in 1976. ‘That’s why we built [it] into the Coastal Act.’

City attorney Christi Hogin said the proposal was not a public works project but a long-ranging plan. She also wrote in the suit that the conservancy was not authorized to undertake public works projects.

‘They’re trying to morph it into a public works project, and that’s not what the Coastal Act had in mind; the Coastal Act had in mind a partnership,’ Hogin said.

Meanwhile, Malibu has developed its own program amendment, which does not allow for overnight camping. (Last December, the City Council voted unanimously to do this.) The Coastal Commission will determine which plan prevails.

(*This post will be updated with a link to the print version of the story here.)

-- Tami Abdollah