Accord Reached on Point Dume Nature Park Access

After years of watching property owners and environmentalists fight over one of Southern California’s most scenic spots, the public is finally getting the point.

Malibu’s Point Dume, that is.

The state Coastal Commission, Malibu city leaders and state parks administrators have agreed to a public access plan for a 33-acre nature preserve at the tip of Point Dume at the western end of Santa Monica Bay.

Visitors soon will be able to park up to 10 cars in an exclusive neighborhood next to the bluff top and take docent-led tours among rare plants and sandy dunes 200 feet above the surf. A special shuttle bus will ferry additional visitors from another parking area that is two miles away.

Officials say the agreement ends years of wrangling and avoids a nasty legal fight that, depending on the outcome, could have jeopardized either the state’s push for open beach access or Malibu’s restrictive beach-area parking policies.

The compromise is scheduled to be announced by state parks Director Rusty Arieas today in a 2 p.m. ceremony at the east end of Westward Beach, beneath the point’s bluff.

For decades, even before Malibu became a city in 1991, bluff-top parking was prohibited. The goal at first was to discourage visits to a secluded spit of sand beneath called Pirates Cove, which was popularized as an unauthorized nude beach. In recent years, the parking ban was designed, officials say, to keep motorists from getting stuck in the sand there and knocking on nearby homeowners’ doors for help.

Taken by the state through eminent domain from a private landowner in the early 1970s, the scenic bluff top is considered a unique coastal scrub and dune habitat that is home to the burrowing owl and the rare giant coreopsis plant. Visitors have had to hike up a steep switchback trail from the beach to reach it.

Officials say that Arieas reached the compromise after pledging to assign a park ranger to watch over the parking spaces to be created along Cliffside Drive and monitor visitors’ use of the preserve.

The Malibu City Council, which signed off on the pact this week, has agreed to finance operation of the shuttle bus between the preserve and the Westward Beach parking lot daily during the summer and on weekends year-round.

Authorities are considering ways to prevent visitors’ cars from blocking neighbors’ ocean views. A community meeting will be held March 2 to outline parking, said Suzanne Goode, an associate resource ecologist for the state parks department.

Malibu City Manager Harry Peacock said state officials have pledged to keep the bluff top free of trash, expand a boardwalk through the area and remove nonnative vegetation such as ice plant that in the past has threatened to snuff out the giant coreopsis.

Peacock denied that opposition to public parking on the bluff has come from celebrities such as Barbra Streisand and Johnny Carson, who live nearby.

In fact, Peacock warned, visitors will have “a hell of a hike” if they try to park there to see famous residents rather than look at pelicans, seals, offshore whales and the native plants. “This is not the place to go for stargazing,” he said with a laugh.

Plenty of neighborhood opposition remains to the parking plan, however, state parks administrators admitted. Until now, the city has used signs and large boulders to keep cars away from the bluffs.

“We’re trying to get out the view to locals that this will be an asset,” said Hayden Sohm, Malibu-area state parks superintendent. “This is the best deal for everybody. It would have been a big mess up there if the Coastal Commission had just made the city remove the signs and boulders.”

Homeowner David Plummer, a Point Dume resident since 1965 and a leader with his wife, Joan, of a campaign to create the nature preserve and supervision, said the neighborhood was overrun when the nude beach was in operation.

The fragile point--named after Catholic missionary Father Dumetz, a contemporary of the famed Father Serra--needs careful protection too, Plummer said. In recent years, the point was littered with trash. “It was a zoo,” he said.

Point Dume resident Madelyn Glickfeld, a former Coastal Commission member who now works as a state parks consultant, predicted that the bluff will become as valuable to the public as Northern California’s famed Point Lobos.

“A lot of people are scared” Point Dume will be overrun by visitors, Glickfeld said. But, she added, the place is a treasure that everyone should be able to share.