Wall-to-Wall Arguments in Del Mar : Coastline: As a Friday deadline nears, some property owners are vowing to continue their fight against a 1988 initiative requiring them to tear down their seawalls to give the public more access.

With the city of Del Mar poised to demolish the patio and seawall of their $1-million beach house, Jack and Angela Scott are stubbornly refusing to surrender.

“Why wouldn’t we try to protect our home?” Angela Scott asked.

But many of her neighbors, exhausted and discouraged, have already given up the fight to save their seawalls in a battle that has consumed the political passions of Del Mar for 20 years.

To local activists, the seawalls rising 3 to 4 feet above the sand and patios behind them have stood as a symbol of Del Mar’s wealthy property owners usurping the public beach.

In 1988, after a bitter campaign, city voters overwhelmingly passed the Beach Preservation Initiative, which made it illegal for beachfront properties to contain protective structures more than 5 feet west of a boundary line roughly concurrent to the property line.

Beachfront residents filed nine separate lawsuits challenging the initiative and the city’s right to enforce it. However, in each case, either the courts backed the public’s right to use the beach or the landowners capitulated to the city’s demands to destroy the walls.

So, one by one, the seawalls have been tumbling, and, for the Scotts, their day of reckoning is Friday. That’s the deadline for them and six of their neighbors to either remove their walls or have the city do it for them.

Former Mayor Brooke Eisenberg, who served on the City Council’s beach issues committee from 1986 to 1988, said the demise of the seawalls is “something people never expected to see.”

In April, the council ordered the Scotts and the neighbors to tear down their seawalls, marking the first time the city has acted to force residents to comply with the initiative.

If the owners don’t go along, the city has already arranged for a contractor to demolish the structures at the property owners’ expense.

Last week, construction crews were tearing down the wall at the house the Howard family has owned since 1946. The seawall has been there since the early ‘50s, according to Keith Howard.

The Bay Area-based attorney still believes he has a legal right to keep the seawall, but, with the city threatening to put a lien on the house if he doesn’t comply--and worried that the city’s crews would damage his house--Howard opted to spend $30,000 to tear down the wall.

“We prefer to do it ourselves,” he said.

But he’ll put up a new seawall, one closer to the house and within the line set by the initiative.

However, some other owners, including the Scotts, have not filed the permits necessary to remove their walls.

Jack Scott said his attorney will seek an injunction to halt the city’s actions, and he will continue the fight “until the courts tell us we have no rights.”

To the Scotts, the issue is a simple matter of protecting their home. They have owned the house since 1968, primarily using it as a summer home and renting it out the rest of the year.

Like most beachfront residents, the Scotts fear a repeat of the storms of 1978 and 1983, which sent waves crashing through the windows of many homes.

“Without a seawall, the property goes down in a storm like 1983,” said Scott, a Los Angeles-based lawyer.

He points to an oft-quoted engineering report, prepared at city expense in 1983, that said that walls 30 feet west of homes would provide the best storm protection. However, the California Coastal Commission and other experts contend that walls 5 feet west of the homes provide more than enough protection.

Scott would not say what grounds he will use to challenge the city’s actions, but most of the previous suits have claimed either that longtime property owners have established prescriptive rights to the land, or that the initiative unconstitutionally “takes” their land.

But city officials are confident such arguments won’t work.

The property owners “have two choices: Either they can spend a lot of money and then remove (the walls), or they can just take them off,” said Dwight Worden, the former Del Mar city attorney hired by the city to defend the lawsuits. “Either way, they’re coming off,” he said.

The seven property owners targeted by the city did not participate in any of the original litigation against the city, and Worden said that, “as soon as we got control over the litigation, the city turned their attention to violators who didn’t litigate.”

In April, the property owners asked for more time in order to find contractors and to develop plans for new seawalls, but the request was denied.

“The request came at a time when four years of activity had already occurred,” Mayor Rod Franklin said. “Everyone knew that this spring we wanted the seawalls removed.”

Local activists argue that the beachfront residents have been stalling so they could enjoy their patios for another summer.

“In reality, what we have is a small group of over-privileged people abusing the general public’s rights,” longtime beach activist Bud Emerson wrote in a recent newspaper column.

The removal of the seawalls from the seven properties alone will return a quarter of an acre to public use, according to Del Mar Associate Planner Monica Tuchscher. The removal of other seawalls has returned stretches of sand as wide as 20 feet along the beach.

“The first time I went down and saw how it looked (after structures had been removed), I almost fell over. I couldn’t believe how good it looked,” said Worden, a longtime Del Mar resident who served as city attorney from 1977 to 1983, when the issue first started to heat up.

For Worden, the initiative helped simplify the debate by giving the council a clear legal mandate. Still, the issues were complicated by the different situations of each owner.

Although opponents of the initiative said the city would go bankrupt defending lawsuits, Worden said the city has spent less than $100,000 on legal fees.

It appeared that the issue might be resolved once and for all last year by a proposed assessment district that would allow beachfront property to replace existing seawalls with structures within the initiative’s boundaries.

The city spent $30,000 developing the district, but the plan broke down when contractors submitted bids for seawalls that many of the homeowners thought were too high.

“They had a legitimate gripe,” Franklin said. “Unfortunately, when you have the city involved you don’t necessarily get the lowest bids.”

Many of the property owners will eventually opt for an assessment district to finance their projects, city officials say, but the concept of a total solution to the controversy seems unlikely.

Even as the long-running debate winds down, bitterness lingers. Even those who have complied with the initiative don’t think they are getting a fair shake from the city.

“We certainly categorically believe that this is a big waste of public time and funds,” Keith Howard said. “I don’t see a shortage of beach, except two days a year, and then it is not Del Mar people using it.”

Last year, Jack Scott said he found himself actually hoping for a major storm so people could judge how much protection the walls built closer to the homes provide.

“If the 5-foot walls didn’t properly protect the house, we’d be in a different situation now,” he said.