Official Fired in Dispute Over Lagoon Work Site : Archeology: Criticism of excavation monitoring leads to dismissal. Project area is recognized as Chumash burial ground.

A Malibu city official in charge of overseeing construction sites to protect Native American artifacts has been fired after allegedly trying to discredit another Chumash Indian doing similar work on a state-funded project.

Qun-Tan Shup Garcia, the city’s Chumash cultural resources manager, was asked by City Manager David N. Carmany to resign formally by Tuesday.

The request came about a month after Garcia charged that supervision was inadequate at the Malibu Lagoon bridge reconstruction site, a Caltrans project. Garcia said that he was not functioning as a city employee at the time. Garcia protested the move at Monday’s City Council meeting, but the council supported Carmany’s decision.

“He doesn’t work here anymore,” said Carmany, who declined to elaborate on the reasons for Garcia’s dismissal. He added only that the city is seeking a new cultural resources manager.

The problems surfaced at the end of April, when Garcia and his stepfather, Kote Lotah, appeared at the bridge work site and told project managers that they should be in charge of the archeological watchdog work instead of the monitor hired by the contractor.

Garcia and Lotah operate a private firm, Owl Clan Consultants, which has been monitoring construction sites in Malibu to protect Native American artifacts for the last 30 years.

According to Paul Varela, director of the Oakbrook Chumash Interpretive Center in Thousand Oaks, Garcia told Joe Martinez, the job supervisor, that the bridge was Owl Clan’s job, and that the work of site monitor Gilbert Unzeuta, who is Chumash and whose services were provided by the Oakbrook Center, was inadequate.

“They told the company that we were invading their territory and that we were stupid,” said Varela. Garcia and Lotah “say that they are the only ones who can trace their bloodlines to Malibu, and that is not true.”

Garcia said that Owl Clan had been in charge of the bridge project during its preliminary stages in 1989 and that he felt he should have been hired to see the job through to its completion.

The area has been recognized by the federal government as a sacramental burial ground for the Chumash, who inhabited much of Southern and Central California.

The bridge, which buckled in January’s rainstorms, is being rebuilt by MCM Construction Inc., a firm hired by the California Department of Transportation for the project. State law requires that a Native American monitor archeologically sensitive construction sites.

Garcia, joined by the American Indian Movement, asserts that Unzeuta has not been following proper procedures.

“GTE went down there [May 10] and dug down 47 inches into a national cemetery with no supervision [from Unzeuta],” said Garcia. “They found some human bones down there, and those are supposed to be turned over to the coroner within 24 hours, and they weren’t until several days later.” GTE workers were moving telephone cables to the work site.

Frank Bergen, a historic preservation officer for Caltrans, said that Unzeuta wasn’t on the site when GTE did its work beneath the roadway near the bridge. The mistake, he added, lies with Caltrans.

Caltrans officials “forgot they were supposed to impose the monitoring requirement on GTE,” Bergen said.

“They were working, for the most part, at a depth where any cultural artifacts would already have been previously disturbed,” said Bergen. “A monitor should have been there, but there were no artifacts found in the excavations done by GTE.”

Bergen said that bone fragments were found on March 8, in connection with a separate excavation for a retaining wall on the south side of the bridge, but that none of those bones were determined to be human.

The management of underground cultural resources has been a controversial topic in Malibu for months.

Property owners must pay for evaluation and mitigation of any threat to disrupt Native American archeological sites, which have been recorded in many places across the city.

The costs can be excessive. At least one property owner has filed a $2.5-million lawsuit against the city over the issue.

Recently, the City Council asked that the ordinance be rewritten, a move that is expected to keep site evaluations under more direct control of city staff. The new ordinance will be presented to the City Council in June or July, Carmany said.