‘Calculated Risk’ Fades : Del Mar Seawall to Stay Despite Angry Protests

The Del Mar City Council, ignoring angry protests by residents, voted unanimously early Tuesday to uphold a permit it had granted earlier for a $200,000 temporary seawall built on the public beach.

Twenty residents opposing the permit granted last month to Ferdinand Fletcher attacked council members for shifting the Monday night agenda item from an early spot on the council docket to the final item to be heard, requiring those who wanted to oppose it to wait more than six hours to have their say.

Dr. Harvey Shapiro, a former councilman, criticized council members for changing the docket “to defuse public input” on the beach issue.

Other speakers cited similar actions by the council, charging that council action had caused half a dozen key city employees, including City Manager Bob Nelson, to resign or retire. They also questioned Mayor Arlene Carsten’s right to move the seawall issue--scheduled fifth on the agenda--to last place. The meeting began at 6 p.m. and concluded about 12:15 a.m. with the seawall permit vote.

Carsten explained that she was altering the agenda to deal with beach issues in a logical sequence. She grouped the four beach-related agenda items and placed them at the end of the agenda after gaining unanimous council consent for the rescheduling. When challenged by a resident for placing the seawall item last, Carsten said: “The whole world does not revolve around the Fletcher seawall.”

The wall, on the public beach nearly 30 feet from the private property lines of the five homes it protects, replaces a wall the Fletcher family installed in 1929 that was destroyed in the winter storms of 1983.

D. Dwight Worden, a former Del Mar city attorney, warned council members that they were “paintin’ yourselves into a corner” by upholding the seawall permit because it gave the seawall “a brand new recycled life.”

Fletcher said he felt that the seawall was placed “in a justified location” on the public beach where it would not be destroyed as the earlier wall was.

In erecting the expensive device, “we took a calculated risk that we might have to remove it,” Fletcher admitted.

Although the seawall was granted under a permit that specified that the city could order it taken down on 30 days’ notice, opponents pointed to other protective structures built along the beach for temporary protection from winter storms that remain years after they were scheduled for removal.

Joseph Lang, who appealed the issuance of the permit, asked council members: “Why should the public lose beach property so that a few property owners would occasionally have to board up their front windows?”

“There is no way that a $200,000 wall can be considered as temporary,” Lang said. “Only a fool or a lawyer would say that it was.”

Carsten and other council members stressed that the permit issued by City Manager Bob Nelson and upheld by the council’s vote early Tuesday was in keeping with previous council actions granting erection of temporary structures to protect oceanfront property from winter storm damage.

She pointed out that the city’s proposed Beach Overlay Zoning Ordinance, still to undergo council and Planning Commission hearings, provides for “the building of seawalls west of private property lines. An example of this is the Fletcher seawall which is protecting public beach land, a city sewer line and private structures.”

Carsten and others said that the public property behind the seawall must be kept open, unobstructed for public use and marked as public. “This balanced approach serves in protecting both public and private property while at the same time assuring that the public rights of beach access are preserved and enhanced,” Carsten said.