Coastal Commission Head Sees Public Access Donnybrook Brewing with the City of Malibu

CHALLENGE—The public access advocacy group known as The City Project has asked the California Coastal Commission to issue a cease and desist order to the City of Malibu to take down all signs “purporting to prohibit camping” in Malibu, including but not limited to the signs at the southern city limits on Pacific Coast Highway and on Malibu Canyon Road near Hughes Laboratories. The Malibu Municipal Code reference for this law was changed to 9.08.090 in 2003. The CCC enforcement supervisor for Southern California, Patrick Veesart, said the matter is “currently under investigation” but preliminary statements by commission staff and members indicate that the city cannot ban public camping.

• Executive Director Says LCP Amendment on Camping Is ‘Waste of Public Resources and Funds’

BY ANNE SOBLE

A letter to California Coastal Commission executive director Peter Douglas from The City Project, a public access and civil rights advocacy group based in Los Angeles with strong academic and policymaking credentials, led to sharp words about the City of Malibu’s compliance with the state Coastal Act.
Speaking after a presentation by The City Project at last Thursday’s commission meeting in Marina del Rey, Douglas said the city’s recent attempt to ban camping on public lands has him “very concerned about the direction that the city is heading in.”
City Project’s executive director and counsel, Robert Garcia had told the panel that Malibu’s “illegal” attempts to ban camping predate the recent wildfires as evident in the three-to-six year old signs posted at city boundaries. He said the signs show “Malibu [is] fishing for rationalization to keep people who don’t live here and can’t pay high camping fees out of Malibu.”
Garcia said Malibu’s “action is reminiscent of efforts by Manhattan Beach to drive out blacks in the 1920s and 1930s.” He said that city destroyed the only black resort in Southern California, a social injustice that only recently has begun to be “rectified with the naming of Bruce’s Beach.”
A somber Douglas replied that “I thought the city was coming into the twenty-first century and was accepting its responsibilities under the Coastal Act.” Then he said, “I can see us heading toward a real public donnybrook with the city over access issues.”
Adding that the city’s recent Local Coastal Program Amendment attempting to ban camping on public lands calls for “a waste of public resources and funds to process,” Douglas indicated there’s “no way it can be found to be consistent with the law.”
Coastal Commissioner Sara Wan, who lives in Malibu and has been severely criticized for aggressive stances on public access, described the political “scene [in Malibu as] very ugly and very unfortunate.” Wan said the personal attacks are “unreal.”
To illustrate this, City Project and others have posted on various websites segments of the Dec. 5 Malibu City Council meeting where close to 200 people crowded council chambers, and booed and catcalled anyone in support of public camping.
At that meeting, a seemingly intimidated council majority backtracked on its previously stated support for an agreement with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and approved a camping ban, ostensibly on the grounds that public camping was a public safety and fire danger issue, even though no wildfire in Malibu history has ever been attributed to legal public camping and the same is true statewide since record keeping began in 1910.
It was also at that December meeting that City Project’s Garcia first raised concerns about the existence of the no camping signs. He was shouted down. A former prosecutor in New York, Garcia said, “I’ve never seen public proceedings as intimidating as you have in Malibu.”
Also booed and heckled was City Project’s policy director Angela Mooney D’Arcy, a member of the Acjachemen Nation Juaneño Band of Mission Indians who has worked at the Wishtoyo Foundation, who urged the city council to comply with state law as outlined in a letter from the Native American Heritage Commission, encouraging “respectful government to government consultation with Native American leaders before cutting off public access to public lands that may implicate Native American religious rights and freedoms.”
When residents tried to drown out D’Arcy’s final comments, Councilmember Sharon Barovsky asked the crowd, “Is this really how you want to present the image of Malibu to the public?” Jeering residents responded with a thunderous, “Yes!”
A Latigo Canyon resident then directed the crowd’s ire at the council members themselves, stating that “as God is my witness, I will recall every single person I can that votes the wrong way.”
The speaker said, “I grew up in Florida in a resort city. [Malibu] looks like the most hellacious city I’ve ever seen in my life. You’ve told me, Barovsky, that you were going to clean up this, this illegal slave operation we have out in front of, of the city hall. We don’t even know if they’re illegal or not. We don’t know who could have been starting fires anywhere.”
Many in the crowd applauded, but someone in a back row quietly mouthed the earlier words of SMMC Executive Director Joe Edmiston who said one needs “tough skin” in Malibu and has to “take faith that [they] sleep the sleep of the just.”
Patrick Veesart, the CCC enforcement supervisor for Southern California, said City Project’s complaints about the signs are “currently under investigation.” He noted that there are ongoing illegal signage issues in Malibu as access groups assert that private signs are put up to try to restrict parking and beach access.
There are those in the city who say they are concerned with the council vote on camping but they state they are reluctant to go on the record with their opposition.
At this Monday’s city council meeting, Councilmember Ken Kearsley was criticized for expressing concern that the camping issue has been taken over by what he called a “mobocracy,” a small group using legal camping as a scapegoat for wildfires rather than addressing actual wildfire prevention and preparation, including poor planning, overdevelopment, outdoor smoking, faulty work equipment, poorly maintained vehicles and senseless arson.
Political observers are waiting to see how Malibu’s camping brouhaha plays out in the upcoming city council campaign and whether a candidate’s position on public camping will be a key litmus test for 2008.