Lawyer Says Cityhood Would Not Cause Liability Problem for Malibu

If Malibu incorporates, the new city would not be liable for any existing landslide or ocean-related disasters as long as it did not create or contribute to the problem, an environmental law attorney told residents who gathered to discuss cityhood this week.

Katherine E. Stone, a lawyer who specializes in land-use liability cases, said that Los Angeles County or the state would be responsible for problems that occur in known landslide areas, such as Big Rock Mesa, unless the city attempted to make improvements and they backfired.

Poke at Courts

“You’ll only be liable if you make the mistakes yourself,” Stone told about 125 Malibu residents who attended a Tuesday night forum on cityhood. “If the city had nothing to do with the problem to begin with, then you wouldn’t be liable for it.”

In a poke at the state’s muddled court system, Stone said that if the city were hit with a large liability lawsuit and lost, it would be several years before it would have to pay.

“Any fears that you have about becoming instantly liable are not realistic,” Stone said. “And you can always limit your liability by contracting out services to other agencies.”

The liability question is a key issue in the cityhood drive, since the community faces annual assaults from the ocean, canyon fires and landslides.

County officials are seeking several ordinances designed at reducing the county’s liability in Big Rock, where the county and the state face up to 200 related lawsuits that could add up to a liability of $200 million to $500 million. The lawsuits accuse the county and the state of responsibility for a massive 1983 landslide.

Cityhood backers are attempting to place the incorporation issue before voters on the November ballot, in an attempt to turn the community into a city of about 20,000.

The cityhood drive was launched in October by local residents who were upset by the county’s attempt to build an $86-million sewer system in Malibu. Incorporation proponents said they wanted to capitalize on “anti-county” sentiment.

2 Major Opponents

However, Pepperdine University and the Los Angeles Athletic Club, two of the largest landowners in the area, said last month that they would not support the incorporation drive.

Athletic club officials said that they will petition the Local Agency Formation Commission, the public agency that handles municipal incorporation requests, to be excluded from the city boundaries. Cityhood proponents believe that Pepperdine also will ask to be excluded.

Ruth Benell, the commission’s executive director, told the residents attending the forum that the agency’s study on the economic feasibility of cityhood for Malibu probably will be completed by the end of April. Public hearings on the study would be held sometime in May, she said.

Malibu’s cityhood drive was encouraged at the Tuesday forum by Bernice Bennett, mayor of Westlake Village, which incorporated in 1981. Bennett told the group that although the 7-year-old city of 11,000 people was still suffering from growing pains, it was the only way for any community to control its own destiny.

Echoing a familiar complaint among Malibu cityhood backers, Bennett said that Westlake Village decided to incorporate when residents felt county officials were unresponsive to the community’s concerns.

“We were so far removed from the county center that we felt they didn’t know what we wanted done,” she said.