Broad Beach Group and Coastal Commission Tackle Erosion

• Western Stretch of Prime Malibu Shoreline Now Looks Like the Perimeter of a War Zone

BY HANS LAETZ

With big winter storms on the horizon and western Broad Beach looking like a fortified battlefront, a group of homeowners says it is spending big bucks to quickly come up with a plan to save the remaining sliver of what used to be, in fact, a broad beach.
Oceanographers, attorneys and coastal engineers are conducting studies paid for by the Trancas Property Owners Association to find out why the sand at what was once one of Malibu’s most beautiful beaches has suddenly eroded, said the group’s attorney, Ken Ehrlich.
More importantly, the Broad Beach homeowners group hopes to put years of enmity and dispute with the California Coastal Commission and public access advocates behind them.
“We’re trying to take a leading role in doing this for the community as a whole and doing the right thing,” Ehrlich said. “We have well-respected coastal engineers, including some who were recommended to us by the Coastal Commission and who have done work for the commission, studying why the tidal action has been so strong.”
Coastal Commission enforcement officer Pat Veesart said the homeowners are showing good faith by getting emergency coastal development permits from the City of Malibu to install stopgap sandbags. “We’ve encouraged them to come up with a universal solution for the entire beach, and they are taking the right steps,” he said.
“We are looking forward to helping them find a solution.”
The permanent plan has not been settled on yet, and it’s too early to discuss options publicly, Ehrlich said. But homeowners at a recent meeting were told longterm restoration solutions might include trucking sand from a distant open pit sand mine to the beach, or asking for permission to dredge nearby waters and pump sand onto the beach.
But Ehrlich said the plan for now is to work on saving the existing shore.
As of this week, sandbags, walls of thick cloth fabric and some huge sand-filled plastic sacks line the western section of the beach, home to some of Malibu’s priciest oceanfront villas. At anything more than a modest high tide, the beach is gone, and persons walking up the shore find themselves in waves at least a foot deep.
The Pacific Ocean has behaved strangely in the last two years and munched into the beach, as usual, during the winter storms. But the normal summertime beach expansion, called accretion, seems to be AWOL. This summer’s normal high tides have chewed into sand dunes that appear on aerial photographs of the shore taken as far back as the 1930s.
Ehrlich said possible repair and replacement plans are being drawn up now, and will be presented to homeowners for financial review next month. The cost, he said, will be “in the millions.”
“The Trancas Property Owners [group is] hiring the best people it can find to come up with a cause and a solution,” Ehrlich said. “We believe the work will only entail property and land masses inland of the mean high tide line.”
But exactly where that property line is, right now and historically, is a matter of continuous dispute. And beneath the current tide of good will lie years of court battles, public relations offensives and bad blood between beach access advocates and homeowners, who have at times hired private guards who have harassed people on public beach sand.
And the path ahead may require intimate coordination and agreement between the two sides, both Veesart and Ehrlich agreed. Veesart noted that any possible plan to alter the shoreline would likely require approval from the Army Corps of Engineers, California State Lands Commission, state Fish and Game Department, City of Malibu and—last and most certainly not least—the Coastal Commission.
Then comes the contentious fight over public access, Veesart said. “and that is always an issue.” No homeowner owns any land beyond the average high tide line, and that line is not permanently fixed and has moved towards the houses this year.
Any additional sand placed on the beach might be seen as a move to push the property line back out to sea, and could mean placing sand on what is now public property. The public, Veesart said, would have every right to demand unfettered access to that beach.
Ehrlich says engineers are working on a plan for some type of hard protection on land that is unquestionably private property, but said that may not be the best concept.
“I don’t believe it would serve the public’s benefit to see a beach to be allowed to erode, and to allow a beach dune system to be destroyed,” he said.
On top of the issue is the fact that the Trancas Property Owners Association is a voluntary group without the power to levy mandatory fees, or force its solution on any landowner in the midst of the hundred-plus homes who may object to the plan. But Ehrlich says he has “never seen the beach owners so unified as they are now.”
Ehrlich and Broad Beach residents vigorously deny allegations that the problem may originate in the 2005 construction of a sand berm using Homeowners Association-paid bulldozers, an allegation leveled by some public access advocates. The berm was quickly bulldozed flat after the Coastal Commission staff issued an order, and pointed out that publicly-owned sand had been scraped onto beachfront lots owned mostly by private parties.
But this year’s erosion has occurred only from Trancas Creek westward, where the berm was built and then bulldozed flat. East of Trancas Creek, regulars say Zuma Beach is wider than in years past, in some places by more than 20 feet.
The public beach at Zuma, however, has been strewn this summer with thousands of small plastic strings that have washed up with the seaweed, apparent litter from early attempts at Broad Beach sandbagging using fiberglass-weave bags. Those bags quickly fall apart in wave action, and homeowners have filled and lost thousands of them this summer.
Hardier sandbags made of jute appear to be the only ones capable of withstanding high tides, and are now the fabric of choice on Broad Beach. In the meantime, county crews have carted off the fiberglass string that washed ashore.
Veesart said the Coastal Commission is watching how the City of Malibu handles the emergency permits for the temporary sandbags, which are by state law good for 90 days and will start expiring next month. The city has jurisdiction on the emergency permits because they are for installations on the landward side of the high tide line, but with that line moving towards houses, the commission may reassert initial jurisdiction on the emergency permits.
And the permanent solution, Veesart and Ehrlich both said, will require the cooperation of all involved.