Malibu Surfside News

This is a story of two Malibus.

The first Malibu held a fundraising party at Bluffs Park on Sunday. Raffles and other activities gathered funds to help complete a huge water treatment scheme at Legacy Park; a floodwater collection, storage, treatment and dispersal project that will top $35 million in costs. This Malibu has enacted the toughest septic tank rules in Southern California, and is working on several expensive, major water treatment projects to clean up pollution hot spots along the beaches.

The other Malibu doesn’t care. It lets precious water shipped here at great expense from a faraway river delta flow across its gardens and out into gutters. It lets moss and green gunk flourish in the dozens of PVC pipes that flow continuously out into ocean sand. The other Malibu looks the other way as beachfront septic tanks employ seepage pits in which the human waste rises and falls each day as it mixes with the ocean’s tides. And it consistently violates a state law that forbids dumping any water, even a downspout of rainwater, into a section of the Pacific around Point Dume and up to Point Mugu—a stretch considered a publicly-owned “crown jewel, an ocean Yosemite” in need of special protection.

Critics say the inescapable conclusion is that some Malibuites exist in both worlds simultaneously.

Two weeks ago, Santa Monica Baykeeper and the Natural Resource Defense Council gave official notice that they intend to file a federal Clean Waters Act suit against the City of Malibu and the County of Los Angeles.

Unless the defendants can convince Baykeeper and NRDC differently, a federal lawsuit can be filed in two months that could place a federal judge in charge of rules for building and remodeling projects in Malibu and beyond. It could also force existing property owners to obey some new strict set of septic tank and runoff-water regulations.

As reported earlier, the legal notice was a surprise to city council members, and some of them smelled politics. They point to the $35 million project at what used to be called the Chili Cook-off site, and to the cooperative and progressive tone the city had adopted for the past five years.

At meetings of the North Santa Monica Bay Watershed Committee, the city has routinely been praised by stakeholders for moving first and fast on septic tanks. For example, Heal the Bay officials praised Malibu for cooperating in a project to use DNA to determine whether human waste was responsible for coliform bacteria levels in canyons that were flowing 12 months a year into fetid ponds at the beaches.

“The city has been doing everything that it can, and it has been doing this with the cooperation and support of the Baykeeper organization,” said Mayor Jeff Jennings when he learned of the suit.

“I think that Malibu has been one of the most-proactive cities in the area,” added City Manager Jim Thoreson.

The city has tightened new construction or remodeling building permits to the point where the routine background grumbling from local builders is again intensifying. Regulations that new construction projects include a way to keep all rainwater runoff on the property are particularly vexing to some. Longtime Malibu resident and architect Ed Niles told a civic group last week that some of the rules are ridiculous.

“It’s been raining in Malibu forever, and that water has been running into the ocean forever. Now you have to come up with a way to keep it on your lot,” he said.

In the past few years, one vacant lot near Trancas has a permanent frog pond established, full of loud nocturnal frogs feasting on the bugs drawn to the new watercourse. The pond is fed by water running off from a subdivision’s community tennis courts and lush landscaping. Sometimes water flows into the pond at about two gallons a minute, day and night.

The pond sits a quarter-mile uphill from two fetid ponds by Zuma Beach, and the area’s groundwater levels are so high that the Zuma ponds are always full of foul water even in the middle of a historic drought.

The ponds are fed by a spring and drain into the sand at Zuma Beach, where millions of visitor days are spent by beachgoers.

A city enforcement officer says they have too much on their hands to track down the tennis court’s owners, and have no city ordinances to prohibit anyone from overwatering to the point of creating a frog pond on someone else’s vacant land.

Unlike some other cities, Malibu does not specifically prohibit a homeowner from sending runoff into a street or beach unless there is sewage in it,

“Why don’t you write a nice letter to your neighbors and ask them to stop?” the city officer tells an inquiring resident.

Under the columns supporting an elevated oceanfront house on Escondido Beach last week, Baykeeper volunteer Mark Abramson pointed at one of dozens of black polyvinyl pipes that stick out of the rocks, just above that morning’s high-tide line. Like many others, this one had a large amount of moss, algae and green gunk growing in what by all appearances is a permanent flow of urban slobber.

“You see some real interesting flows out of those pipes,” he said. Sometimes the unmistakable scent of Downey brand fabric softener or Tide detergent is present, he said, but more often it’s just gunky water.

When it is tested, the urban runoff contains a brew of viruses, germs, bacteria and nutrients to help the vermin grow as the water flows into the sand or the surf, depending on the tide.

Abramson points several hundred feet up the beach. “That’s the place where they measured the ocean water that flunked the last set of tests, and everyone said they were surprised that Escondido flunked. Well, we’re not surprised, look what’s flowing in.”

Abramson and Baykeeper scientist Carlos Carreon walked from Escondido Creek east to Latigo Bay, and stopped at about every third or fifth house to observe outflow from plastic pipes running into the ocean or sand, continuously dumping green, filthy water. The Santa Monica Mountains region, they also emphasized, is in the midst of a major drought.

“We don’t know where this water is coming from, and we can’t go up in these houses to find out,” Abramson said. “But the city can, and they haven’t.

“We’ve gotten a lot of lip service, but the city has never walked down this beach and gone to the homeowners to say ‘you have got to stop this.’”

“If that is happening in the City of Malibu, I’d sure like to know where,” said Vic Peterson, the city’s chief building and planning official. Peterson and Craig George, the city’s wastewater expert, are part of the team recognized across the county as aggressive leaders in fighting stormwater runoff.

Some city council members reacted similarly when told of the Baykeeper findings.

“If they know where this is, then they have an obligation to tell us exactly where so that we can take steps,” said Councilmember Sharon Barovsky. “And if there were suds flowing into a beach somewhere, my phone should be ringing.”

But Baykeeper’s Abramson said Malibu officials should know exactly where those pipes are. “In 2001 Baykeeper did a report documenting these drains, their very locations, their exact locations.

“That report was hand-delivered and widely distributed, and since then we have been talking and talking and talking but nothing has been done about these drains.”

Baykeeper is particularly irked that the city has done nothing about a 30-year-old state law that prohibits cities from allowing any sort of runoff whatsoever – even rainwater—from entering an Area of Special Biological Significance that starts at Latigo Creek and extends to Point Mugu.

The city has applied for an “exception” to allow rainwater to flow into the ASBS, which is at the state water board. But the efflux onto Escondido Beach would not be permitted even if the city wins an exception for stormwater, Baykeeper officials said.

The proposed lawsuit also claims that Malibu allows too much pollution into Malibu Creek, the area where the city hopes to remove 85 percent of the contamination coming from within Malibu with the Legacy Park project. A planned wastewater collection system in the Malibu Colony, Serra Retreat and Civic Center commercial area will clean up the rest, said council member Ken Kearsley.

But on the urban runoff issue, the two sides seem far apart. The environmentalists say they are open to talks with the city, but none are scheduled.

Some city council members express genuine surprise about the muck-in-the-pipe issue, and want to work it out. Another said the threat of a lawsuit means all avenues of compromise are off.

“When you talk litigation to me, that means all discussions are over,” said veteran city council member Andy Stern.

Under a house and in the wet sand, Abramson says at the very least the city must commit to inspect beachfront drainage systems and prohibit anything other than rainwater from coming out.

“Right now, unless a house has a septic system fail and it starts to stink, the city does not take action,” Abramson said. “This water has sprinkler flow, fertilizer and pesticides in it for sure, and God only knows what else, and it flows continually into a protected water.”

As of this week, no talks between representatives of the two sides are scheduled. Unless some compromise is reached, the lawsuit can be filed in August.

Abramson said he agrees that, on one side of the issue, Malibu has made enormous strides, with the massive Legacy Park expenditure and new runoff-cleansing plants going online this year at the Civic Center, Marie Canyon and Paradise Cove.

“But down here in the sand is where the rubber meets the road, and we haven’t seen any progress in 15 years,” the Corral Canyon resident said.

“That’s what this suit is all about.”