Coastal Panel Urged to Reject Malibu Land-Use Plan

The staff of the California Coastal Commission has recommended that the state reject the latest version of a Malibu land-use plan proposed by the Board of Supervisors, citing disagreement over construction limits in fragile canyon areas and on thousands of small mountain lots originally intended for cabins or tents.

The recommendation, issued in a report last week, was expected: Two staff representatives testified at a county public hearing in September about their disagreements with Los Angeles County over those issues.

During the difficult process of drawing up a blueprint for development, the state has generally emphasized protection of Malibu’s sensitive environment, which is plagued by fire, flood and falling rock. The county has focused on the rights of property owners to build on their land.

The state coastal panel is scheduled to consider the Malibu plan at its Los Angeles meeting Dec. 11. In 1983, the state rejected the county’s original Malibu proposal, with one coastal commissioner labeling it “an embarrassment.”

Supervisor Deane Dana, whose 4th District includes Malibu, has hinted that the battleground will shift to the courts if the state does not accept the county’s proposal, which supervisors adopted in October.

“I’m hopeful that the Coastal Commission will see the county’s position on these few remaining issues,” said county Planning Director Norman Murdoch. “I’m hopeful these can be resolved on the 11th.”

The state and county must agree on a plan before it can take effect in a region stretching along 27 miles of shoreline west of Topanga Canyon and five miles inland to the heart of the Santa Monica Mountains. The two governments have been trying to reconcile their strikingly different visions of Malibu’s future for more than 3 1/2 years.

In the version that will go before the Coastal Commission next week, county supervisors have incorporated the essence of a state plan adopted in November, 1985. County supervisors have accepted a huge reduction in growth from the amount they had originally suggested in 1983, from 12,095 to 6,582 residences.

They also agreed to eliminate Trancas Canyon as a commercial center, generally concentrating new shops, offices and hotels in the areas of the Malibu Civic Center, Pepperdine University and Point Dume-Paradise Cove.

And they agreed to impose a cap of 2,110 new dwellings until Pacific Coast Highway is improved to handle additional traffic.

But they also made several changes in the state’s recommended plan, including:

Elimination of a requirement that builders purchase small “cabin lots” for about $15,000 each and essentially “retire” those properties from future construction whenever they subdivide area along the coast highway.

The state’s intent was to direct construction toward the flatlands near the beach and away from the rugged mountains, without changing the total number of lots in the region, a plan Dana called “outrageous and unworkable.”

Instead, the county suggested a less complicated approach, a simple building cap of 6,582 residences.

But Tom Crandall, the coastal panel’s South Coast director, said that without the purchase program or a similar way to ensure that the limit would be observed, “It’s designed to be a failure.”

The staff report to the coastal commissioners adds that “the second flaw in the County’s proposal is that . . . the plan would provide no incentive to avoid development of problem parcels” in steep hillside areas.

Elimination of a requirement that new subdivisions include lots at least as large as those within a quarter-mile of the subdivision. The state’s intent, said Crandall, is to keep urban-scale development--which would be on smaller lots--away from still-rural areas, where properties are larger.

But “such averaging of lot size is really sort of anti-planning, substituting a knee-jerk application rather than using quite sophisticated methods of determining whether land is suitable for development,” said county Planning Director Murdoch.

Elimination of a requirement for specific plans for watershed areas where creeks snake along Malibu canyon bottoms. The state wants specific plans for each canyon before allowing building to begin.

The coastal staff report suggests that all three requirements be reinstated to reach a settlement on the plan.

“It’s now down to basically these three issues,” Crandall said.

However, the staff report also disagrees with other changes made by the county, including wording that implies that high-intensity development would be allowed at the mouth of Topanga Canyon and that building could proceed on privately owned sandy beaches.

Several county changes were accepted by the state staff, including a suggestion to exempt the furthermost inland portion of the coastal zone from the 2,110-unit interim construction cap linked to improvement of the coast highway.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who proposed the change, had said most people living in the middle of the Santa Monica Mountains use the Ventura Freeway rather than Pacific Coast Highway.