DANA POINT : Homeowner Edgy Over Lot Setback

Bluff-top homeowner Addison DeBoi looks out his kitchen window and imagines an impending disaster.

DeBoi, who lives on the historically unstable bluff called the Capistrano Palisades, 100 feet above Coast Highway, can see an array of wooden stakes and lines in the soil that mark the future 8,200-square-foot home of his soon-to-be neighbor. But those stakes and lines represent a home too close to the cliff edge, DeBoi said.

“Basically, we’re concerned about the safety of our own house if that one is built,” said DeBoi, who, with his wife, Kristi, has lived on the bluff top for four years. “The bluff is a precarious place to live in the first place, but especially with something like this.”

When city planners OKd the new home design, DeBoi howled in protest and filed an appeal with the City Council. After hours of testimony last month, the council postponed a decision until this week, a postponement that was recently put off another month.

According to rules set up by the Capistrano Beach Specific Plan, the county body that predates the 2-year-old Dana Point City Council, a 25-foot setback from the cliff is required of all homes on the bluff top. But 25 feet from where? The jagged edge of the 100-foot lot, replete with gullies, cracks and ravines that slope down to the highway, does not lend itself for precise measurement.

Elizabeth A. Binsack, a city planner, admitted that the rules are straightforward but measurement of bluff tops is not.

“The hard thing with respect to bluff-top lots is that each one is different,” Binsack said. “This one is even more unusual because it’s a meandering bluff top. . . . But the geologist we had study the site doesn’t seem to have a problem with the project.”

That geologist, Dennis L. Hannan of Zeiser Geotechnical Inc. of Costa Mesa, who has been doing bluff-top property evaluation for 18 years, said his measurements show the proposed house to be at least 33 feet from the cliff’s edge.

“The building is set back farther than I would set it back if I were the consultant on the project,” Hannan told the council.

It is this kind of talk that frustrates DeBoi, a nuclear engineer. The measurement from the cliff notwithstanding, DeBoi points to the unstable history of the bluffs taken from the report Hannan presented to the council.

The report links bluff failure to storms dating to 1884, including a loss of 20 to 30 feet of cliff in one major storm in 1938. Earlier this year, bluffs in San Clemente, about a mile south, failed, causing a landslide that closed Coast Highway.

“Existing 25-foot bluff-top structural setbacks . . . are inadequate and should be increased in several areas, up to as much as 100 feet,” said Hannan in his report to the council.

“We’re just looking for some consistency,” DeBoi said.

Before he and his wife bought their home, DeBoi said they considered buying the lot next door but didn’t because of the problems with its terrain.

“We wound up paying more for our home because we were told we would have to build way back, much farther than what is planned now,” DeBoi said. “That is what is so aggravating. Why is it that the interpretation of the rules is all of a sudden changing?”

Standing on the empty lot near its edge, DeBoi pointed to a small crack in the rain-soaked soil.

“See this crack,” DeBoi said. “This is what happens in this expansive clay soil we have here. When in rains it expands, and when it dries these cracks emerge. We all know these clay soils are a problem here.”