Housing Plan Makes Waves : Malibu: A developer’s proposal for five homes is at the center of a dispute over tide levels and effects on LeChuza Beach.

For centuries, people have come and gone along the stretch of Malibu coast now called LeChuza Beach--Chumash Indians, Spanish missionaries, the Mexicans who ousted the Spanish, the Anglos who ousted the Mexicans. By 1932, a developer had built cottages and a road there.

Through it all, the tide came and went too. It was mostly ignored--except in 1938, when it washed away the summer cottages.

Now, however, there is a new battle over the land in which the tide itself is at issue.

On Thursday, developer Norman Haynie is scheduled to appear before the California Coastal Commission, seeking permission to build five homes, a road and a seawall on the quarter-mile-long beach, which is about four miles northwest of Point Dume.

Three of the homes would be clustered at one end of the beach and two at the other, each built on concrete slabs stuck into bedrock, which Haynie said would withstand the tide and storms. Sea Level Drive, which arches down to both ends of the beach, would be extended into cul-de-sacs. Haynie has proposed selling the state half of the property he owns for use as a public beach.

The Coastal Commission’s staff has recommended that the commission reject the project, just as it did in January when it considered Haynie’s grander plan calling for 17 homes on the site.

The staff report notes that there is a problem in identifying the location of the mean high-tide line. By law, all land seaward of that mark is public property.

As the state interprets the law, the mean high-tide line is where official survey maps say it is, even if the maps are out of date. LeChuza Beach was last surveyed in 1928, and some of the nearby homeowners, who oppose the project, say the high-tide mark that the survey shows is now 25 feet out to sea.

A new survey, project opponents say, would move the line onto the beach--and would thus make much of the land on which Haynie proposes to build public property.

But even without that problem, said Jack Ainsworth, who wrote the staff report, the project faces some formidable hurdles.

Ainsworth said the homes, road and a proposed 200-foot seawall would block public access to the beach, a violation of the Coastal Act, the 1976 state law aimed at protecting the state’s coastline. Evidence from a number of studies suggests that seawalls erode sand, causing further loss of public beach property, the report said. It added that sewage from the development could damage sensitive marine life and kelp beds offshore.

If the Coastal Commission takes the unusual step of overriding the recommendation of its staff and approves the project, Haynie would still not be out of the woods. He would need the OK from Malibu’s new City Council, whose members all ran for election on slow-growth platforms.

Homeowners who live on the bluff overlooking LeChuza have been fighting the project for months. One recent morning, resident Sarah Dixon walked down to the beach to explain why.

She stood on a strand of seaweed left by the waves. This, she said, is the real high-water mark. Then she pointed to a spot about 25 feet out in the ocean. That, she said, is where the official mean high-tide line was established in 1928. “It’s out somewhere in a bed of kelp.” Another project opponent, Sara Wan, vice president of the Malibu Township Council, said the proposed homes would “be right in the ocean.” If the city allows them to be built, she said, it could be liable for damage caused by storms and battering from the tide.

Residents and the Coastal Commission have asked the State Lands Commission to take another look at the mean high-tide line.

But Lance Kiley, chief of the state’s Division of Land Management, said that his department, which includes the lands commission, doesn’t have the money for a new survey.

Kiley said that based on a 1928 county survey and the tract map from the cottages, which was done in the 1930s, his staff has decided that there is no evidence that the high-water mark has eroded substantially enough to affect Haynie’s project.

Even so, Kiley said, “in my personal opinion, I don’t think it’s advisable to build anything down there. The fact that the summer cottages were washed away would be enough to give me pause.”

Haynie said he has had seven engineers study the plans for the homes, and they will be safe. “They will not be destroyed by a wave unless it’s a tsunami,” he told the City Council last week.

But just in case, he reassured the council, the Coastal Commission always requires oceanfront homeowners to sign a waiver promising not to sue any government agency for property damages.

Furthermore, Haynie said at the council meeting, the city has no right to deprive him of his constitutional property rights.

He gripped the sides of the podium and lowered his voice to a near whisper. “That’s what an awful lot of people have died for in the past,” he said. “There has to be some consideration of property rights. . . . And there will be, if not this year, then next year. Or when the Supreme Court hears it.”

“Oooohhh,” said some in the audience, in mockery of what appeared to be a threat.

Haynie and the homeowners are both presenting themselves as champions of the public’s right to use LeChuza Beach.

“It is one of the last stretches of public beach left in Malibu,” Dixon said. “We must fight to preserve it.”

But Haynie contends the homeowners are hypocrites. “They just want to keep the beach for themselves,” he said. “The public can’t use that beach right now without getting kicked off.”

Members of the local homeowners association confirm that they do hire a guard--the teen-age son of a resident--in summer months to stop outsiders from using the beach. But many people from the public are allowed to walk through, they said.

In the long run, it seems likely that the debate over the high-tide line will prove academic.

“He’s at our mercy,” said Councilwoman Missy Zeitsoff, who predicted the project would almost certainly die.