Coastal Panel to Review Another Malibu Plan

For more than two years, the California Coastal Commission and Los Angeles County have attempted, without success, to reconcile their strikingly different visions of the future of Malibu. On Tuesday, coastal commissioners will try again to adopt a land-use plan that both they and the county Board of Supervisors can accept.

The latest revision to be considered by commissioners still allows less than half the new development originally proposed by the county and retains many of the technical additions made in June over county objections.

But the commission staff has addressed several of the county’s main concerns about the previous draft, allowing the possibility of more development in the Malibu Civic Center area east of Pepperdine University, making exceptions to a two-story height limit along Pacific Coast Highway and adding flexibility to a cap on construction until the highway is improved.

Since the last go-round during the summer--when the commission adopted a plan that was rejected out-of-hand by the supervisors--commission staff members have met twice with county planners in San Francisco and once in Los Angeles.

‘Should Satisfy Everybody’

The new proposal “should satisfy everybody,” said Steve Scholl, the commission analyst who is responsible for the plan’s contents.

But satisfying everybody may well be impossible. Strong emotions and sharp differences have been hallmarks of the discussions over Malibu--a region plagued by fire, flood and falling rock, whose beaches and mountain parks attract hordes of visitors from all over the Los Angeles Basin and whose numerous small property owners want to build on their land.

Coastal commissioners, civic group representatives and county officials received the new proposal last week and were able to review it only briefly before the weekend.

Initial reaction from local residents and county representatives was not good.

“There are 42 changes that were made” since June, said Madelyn Glickfeld, land-use chairman of the Malibu Township Council, which represents about 1,000 Malibu families. “Two or three are fine with us. Fourteen or 15 can be resolved with wording changes. The rest are really a problem.” A major concern of her group has been that development in Malibu could overburden Pacific Coast Highway, the only direct link between Malibu and Los Angeles.

The Township Council’s position could influence commissioners; many of the group’s earlier recommendations were adopted by the commission in June as additions to the staff plan then under consideration.

County Planning Director Norman Murdoch also is concerned about several portions of the proposal. He believes that the commission staff did not undo enough of the restrictions added in the last round.

Still, county officials have taken a more conciliatory stance than they did in June.

Plan ‘Unacceptable’

After the commission’s vote then, Murdoch called the state plan “unacceptable” and added that he was “so angry I can’t think of what to say.” And Supervisor Deane Dana, whose 4th District includes Malibu, said the Coastal Commission’s action in June “wiped out eight years of thorough planning effort in Malibu.”

The county’s fury led Michael Fischer, who was then the commission’s executive director, to predict that agreement between the two feuding governmental bodies had been pushed “from months away to years away.”

Last week, Murdoch said that despite his objections to parts of the latest draft, “it’s my hope that next Tuesday we can disprove Mike Fischer’s prediction. . . . We can come so close to a meeting of the minds that we may well disprove it.”

Major policies in the latest proposal include:

- Exceptions from a cap on new development until Pacific Coast Highway has been improved. The commission staff proposes in the latest draft that no more than 2,110 residences and 500,000 square feet of commercial space be built unless the road can carry more traffic.

In the newest draft, exceptions are allowed for buildings that will not add more cars to the road and for developers who find a way to mitigate the effects of additional traffic.

Said Scholl: “My hope is that this will encourage creative thinking about transportation, such as car-pooling, rather than just railing at the cap.”

But Murdoch said, “I don’t want to appear ungrateful, but no, it doesn’t” solve the county’s problems with the cap. “It’s so hard to prove that a project has no impact on traffic.”

- An increase in permitted development at the Malibu Civic Center. The commission agreed to raise the maximum allowed there from 1.2 million to 1.6 million square feet if a specific plan is established for the area. Murdoch does not believe the increase is high enough; Glickfeld says it is too much.

- Exceptions to a two-story height limit along Pacific Coast Highway, to allow three stories where other three-story buildings exist and where such structures would not block the ocean view. The county had sought a three-story limit along the entire road; the Township Council objects to any construction above two stories.

The commission will consider the proposal at the Airport Holiday Inn at its 10 a.m. meeting.

And “I think it’ll be bloody, in any case, if it runs true to form,” said Commissioner Michael Wornum.