Bluffs Park LNG Fundraiser Is ‘Star’ Studded Event

UNITED—Pre-film reception host Pierce Brosnan (left) and Roma Downey and Mark Burnett were among those at the Landon Center voicing their opposition to the three-football-field long,14-story tall Cabrillo Port floating LNG facility at last Friday’s fundraiser and call to arms.

Photo Credit MSN/Hans Laetz
FULL HOUSE—Malibu Bluffs Park was packed with residents who came to see “An Inconvenient Truth” and participate in the kick-off of the community’s anti-LNG campaign.

• Project Opponents Shows Solidarity As Cabrillo Port Permit Is Delayed Again

BY HANS LAETZ

Forget the celebrities, an unscripted celestial body of a different sort stole the show at Friday night’s anti-LNG rally, while more than a thousand Malibu residents were watching “An Inconvenient Truth” outdoors at Bluffs Park.

Ten minutes into the movie, just as Al Gore started explaining how thin the Earth’s atmosphere really is, a giant meteor streaked down from the northern sky, breaking into pieces above the outdoor movie screen.

The audience, at first stunned, applauded what could be interpreted as nature’s reminder of who is in charge.

Other stars may have been aligned Friday, as state officials disclosed that the Cabrillo Port permit, scheduled for action last summer, is still on indefinite hold because of the volume of comments and objections received from the public.

“We can’t even begin to estimate when we can begin the next phase of hearing,” a state environmental official said.

The movie showing, sponsored by Coastal Advocates-CCPN, the City of Malibu and the Malibu Surfside News, gathered an overflow crowd on the soccer field, and was perhaps the largest movie showing in Malibu history. It was the first anti-LNG event in the city, where civic activism against the plant is increasing.

“I don’t think Malibu has been as united on this as it has about anything since incorporation, or the sewer,” said longtime political activist Patt Healy at the prescreening fundraiser.

Pierce Brosnan, the former James Bond star and 20-year-Malibu resident, hosted the VIP reception and film, which drew paparazzi and Los Angeles TV stations to the anti-LNG event.

“When you look at Santa Barbara, and wonder how they got to live with those oil platforms, you understand our fight,” Brosnan said. He ticked off environmental problems the BHP Billiton project proposed for 13.8 miles off the Malibu coast could cause.

Local opposition to the Cabrillo Port project was fairly muted until last summer, when a public hearing into environmental impacts gathered a crowd of 350 screaming, unhappy Malibu residents. Since then, locals have peppered government agencies with written objections to the BHP Billiton energy terminal plan.

Nearly 13,000 objections, many of them form letters, were sent to the Environmental Protection Agency when it asked for public comment on air and water pollution permits that BHP Billiton has requested.

A separate, general permit for Cabrillo Port has been on indefinite hold for nearly two years, while state and federal officials seek answers from the company to scientific objections raised by local residents and lawyers and scientists working for the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center.

In Sacramento Monday, a state official confirmed that public hearings on that permit, originally scheduled for last summer and then next month, have once again slipped.

“The schedule depends on several things, such as getting the information that we’ve requested from BHP Billiton to respond to the comments we’ve gotten from Malibu and other sources,” said Dwight Sanders, an environmental planning division chief at the California State Lands Commission.

More than 1,400 specific points raised by the public last summer in regards to the 2,500-page revised environmental impact report have to be sorted out and answered, Sanders said, before the Lands Commission can hold public hearings.

“That delay is a reflection of the fact that there are tremendous problems, raised by both experts and residents, that this [project] would bring about,” said lead attorney Linda Krop at the Environmental Defense Center. “This project, had there been quick approval with no objections, could have had its permits approved in April of ’05.”

Krop estimated that the earliest that the final round of public hearings on the overall permits could be held is in December.

BHP Billiton first filed for permission to use federal and state tidelands for its LNG processing facility off Malibu in 2003, and told stockholders it expected to have permits by 2005 and begin operating in 2010. But the project has been beset by an incomplete application, federal questions about safety, coastal advocates saying it would be ugly and dirty, and news reports about its impact on the coast.