County Awaits Malibu’s Alternative to Sewer Plan : Supervisors: Despite a cease-fire, coming up with a proposal that satisfies all won’t be easy, observers say.

Now that Los Angeles County has declared a cease-fire in its effort to build a controversial sewer system in Malibu, the next move belongs to Malibu’s civic leaders if a lasting accommodation is to be reached.

“What we’ve wanted all along is for the county to leave us alone and let us solve our own problems,” Mayor-elect Walt Keller said after Tuesday’s vote by the Board of Supervisors to temporarily halt efforts to build the proposed $43-million project.

But even opponents of the county’s sewer proposal acknowledge privately that the task of devising a sewer plan acceptable to Malibu residents may be easier said than done.

“After all of the fighting, there is no consensus out there for the kind of system that would be acceptable to the community,” said one veteran observer. “Instead, what you’ve got is a lot of hostility to the county’s plans.”

The county has long argued that a sewer system is needed, citing pollution caused by leaking septic tanks as a health threat. Critics, while acknowledging that some form of waste water management system may be needed, oppose the county’s plan as too big and expensive and say it would foster widespread development.

In a further gesture of goodwill, the supervisors also voted to drop county opposition to a provision being considered in the Legislature that would enable Malibu to collect more than $1 million in property taxes for the fiscal year that begins in July. The measure by state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita) that contains the provision won approval Wednesday from the Assembly Local Government Committee. The vote was 10 to 0.

Although both actions pleased Malibu partisans, some were still smarting over recent disclosures that the county wants to charge Malibu residents for the more than $500,000 in legal and lobbying expenses it ran up in its effort to thwart incorporation while trying to build the sewer.

“The whole thing is obscene, and I don’t think we’ve seen the final chapter on that issue,” City Councilwoman-elect Carolyn Van Horn said.

The unanimous vote to halt further attempts to build the sewer for 90 days came at the first meeting of the supervisors since the departure of Supervisor Pete Schabarum, a frequent Malibu foe, and the arrival of Gloria Molina, whose first full day on the job was Tuesday.

Although the halt became effective Tuesday, it will be rescinded unless the Malibu City Council undertakes certain actions at its first official meeting March 28, when Malibu becomes a city.

The council-elect gave Supervisor Ed Edelman, who sponsored both of Tuesday’s measures, private assurances of its willingness to initiate the actions prior to the vote.

In return for the county’s gesture, the newly elected City Council would take immediate steps to hire a consultant to study possible alternatives to the county’s much-maligned sewer plans.

The council would also suspend for 90 days any litigation by the new city against the county related to the sewer, as well as encourage other parties to do so.

Malibu’s leaders more than a month ago indicated their willingness to hire a consultant.

The City Council-elect is a party to a lawsuit by the Malibu Township Council, a civic group, which seeks to dissolve the tax assessment district set up by the county in 1989 to pay for the project.

Edelman said that the 90 days offered Malibu’s leaders is “a chance to solve their own sewer problems, keeping our system in the background.”

As part of the arrangement, the county and the new city will jointly ask the California Coastal Commission to postpone until at least July a hearing scheduled for next month on the county’s request to start construction of the project.

Some observers predict that it could take months for Malibu’s leaders to devise an alternative sewer plan, and depending on whether such a plan is acceptable to the county, and the Coastal Commission, it might require many more months before the matter is resolved.

The state panel approved the county’s current plans in principle in 1989, when it authorized the tax assessment district.

Besides $511,000 in county legal fees, residents whose properties were assessed to pay for the sewer project have also been socked with $60,000 in fees to lobbyists hired by the county to push the project before the Coastal Commission and other agencies.

The Times disclosed last week that the county had spent more than $6 million and was committed to another $2.4 million in its attempts thus far to start work on the sewer system.

According to county documents, $256,000 of the legal expenses were paid to the law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, represented chiefly by attorney Elwood Lui, to represent it in its long legal battle with cityhood boosters over Malibu’s efforts to become a city.

Last month, a Superior Court judge ordered the county to pay $35,000 in legal fees incurred by lawyers for cityhood supporters in one of the lawsuits. County officials said they also intend to add the $35,000 to the other costs the assessment district property owners will be expected to pay.

Other legal expenses incurred by the county in connection with the sewer project include $155,000 in legal services provided by the county’s own lawyers, and $64,000 paid to the Los Angeles firm of O’Melveny & Myers to represent the county before the Coastal Commission and other agencies.

James Colbert, the primary attorney for the county from O’Melveny & Myers, billed the county at $350 and $375 an hour for much of his work, including appearances before the Coastal Commission, county records show.

For just one meeting of the Coastal Commission, in January, the county paid out an estimated $7,000 to have in attendance a contingent that included Colbert, its own legal counsel, top administrators of the Department of Public Works, its primary lobbyist, and at least eight consultants employed by the company hired to do the project engineering.

Of the fees paid to lobbyists, $44,000 went to Rose & Kindel, a Los Angeles firm, and another $16,000 to Newport Beach consultant Roger Osenbaugh for work involving the Coastal Commission and other agencies. Osenbaugh, and Susan McCabe, the county’s primary lobbyist from Rose & Kindel, are former coastal commissioners.

The lobbyist money was part of $448,000 paid to former Long Beach public works Director James Pott as project manager. Last week, the supervisors, with Edelman dissenting, voted to award Pott another $260,000 through the period ending in June, 1992.

At the same time, the supervisors also approved another $418,000 to Engineering Sciences Inc. for the engineering, which public works officials said was to cover work already completed.

The latest appropriations, however, coming just a week before Tuesday’s action, infuriated sewer opponents.

“I think their strategy is to run up the bills as high as they can get them, thinking that there’s no way the project can be turned back, but that’s going to backfire,” sewer opponent Sara Wan said.

She accused the county of being “enormously wasteful” and predicted that if a lawsuit by sewer opponents to turn back the county’s sewer plans succeeds, “the tax assessment district will be dissolved and they’ll have to turn to the General Fund to bail themselves out.”