Real Malibu

BY BILL KOENEKER

The California Coastal Commission staff has recommended that a 24-acre bluff top parcel historically known as Crummer Field could be developed with a five-home subdivision and a public ball field, but only if the developer kicks in $750,000 as a mitigation fee. The matter is scheduled for the commission’s January meeting in Huntington Beach.
The land is currently zoned commercial visitor-serving and coastal planners believe such valuable zoning, if retired, should have offsets to compensate.
“The mitigation fee shall be for the protection, enhancement and provision of lower-cost visitor-serving uses elsewhere along the coast…to offset the loss of the priority land use in the city,” the staff report concludes, having already asserted that commercial visitor-serving zoning has a high priority with Coastal Commission policy.
The request is to be heard in the form of a Local Coastal Program Amendment, which seeks to modify the requirements of the planned development land use designation of the LCP to allow for a mix of residential and recreational use, instead of commercial visitor-serving use, the current designation on the vacant parcel adjacent to Bluffs Park.
The owner of the site, Richard Ackerman, approached the city several years ago about subdividing the parcel into eight new lots and developing the site with five new single-family residences with a private road in the eastern portion of the property and dedicate the westernmost two-acres of the site to the city, to expand the adjacent city-owned park with an additional baseball field and 35 parking spaces.
An Environmental Impact Report was completed and the city and developer have approached the commission with the LCPA.
There has been a back and forth between the developer and the commission staff about the mitigation fee.
“The commission staff has identified potential public projects in the area that are in need of funding to implement affordable visitor-serving accommodations, such as the former Topanga Ranch Motel owned by the state, which is considering rehabilitation,” the CCC staff report states.
“The property owner has submitted a study to commission lower cost overnight accommodations serving the City of Malibu and its vicinity. The study asserts that commercial offerings in Malibu generally cater to more affluent visitor/consumers rather than visitors seeking low cost overnight accommodations, due in part to the high cost of land in Malibu, which is a major obstacle to constructing new low cost overnight accommodations,” the commission report goes on.
The property owner insisted that there is ample inventory of low-cost overnight accommodations in the greater Malibu vicinity and also notes State Parks and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy are developing plans to bring more low-cost overnight opportunities to the coastal area, including at the nearby Bluffs Park.
However, the CCC staff counters the proposed LCPA would result in the loss of land currently designated for visitor-serving commercial recreational opportunities. “Specifically, the request is inconsistent with [coastal policies]. Therefore, the amendment must be denied as submitted. In order for the proposed land use conversion from commercial visitor-serving to residential/ recreational to be found consistent with the Coastal Act, it must be appropriately mitigated since the proposed land use change would allow for residential development on the subject property, which is not a priority use. Ideally, the loss of area designated for commercial visitor-serving use should be offset by re-designating some other equivalent area that would be designated for visitor serving use. As an alternative, the property owner has offered to pay an in-lieu mitigation fee of $750,000 to assist funding affordable overnight accommodations elsewhere in the coastal zone.”
The report notes the CCC staff modification would require the city to add a new land use plan policy to require payment of the $750,000 prior to issuance of permits and the fee would be used to fund new local public access by rehabilitating the Topanga Ranch Motel.

BY BILL KOENEKER

The Malibu City Council at its next meeting on Jan. 11 is poised to appropriate $1 million for a planned makeover of the Michael Landon Center at Bluffs Park.
The money would come from what is called the city’s undesignated general fund reserve. If the council approves the expenditure, the general reserve fund will dip to $7.9, which is lower than the city council’s goal established almost 10 years ago of maintaining at least $8 million in the fund.
Last October, the council received a follow-up report on the expansion of the center. The report included three design options and an estimated project cost of $1.5 million.
The council indicated it wanted to move forward with some sort of expansion plan and discussed a million-dollar appropriation.
The existing building is comprised of two octagon-shaped structures that are 1472 square feet in size and connected by the entrance lobby of 352 square feet for a total of 3296 square feet.
The staff told council members plans were being considered for adding a second story for office space for staff, multiuse room for classes and conference room for public meetings. The expansion would directly benefit recreation programs by including additional classes for dance, fitness, art, music and teen activities, according to the staff.
In other business, the council will be told about the results of an annual independent audit report for fiscal year 2009.
The general fund reserve decreased at fiscal year end, according to a staff report by Assistant City Manager/Administrative services Director Reva Feldman.
The total fund balance of $21.7 million at June 30, 2009 is a decrease of $590,878 from the previous fiscal year, she wrote.
“The decrease is due to capital expenditures for the Legacy Park project. The general fund reserve totaled $18.4 million at fiscal year end. Of that amount, $1,184,644 was reserved for encumbrances and prepaid expenses, $2.5 million was designated as the deposit for City Hall acquisition, $1.7 million as designated for City Hall, $3.7 million was designated for capital improvement projects and $142,346 was reserved for vehicles and information technology,” Feldman wrote.
Feldman indicated the special revenue funds, which account for all restricted monies designated for specific uses, ended the last fiscal year with an aggregate fund balance of $3 million representing a decrease of $200,000 from the previous fiscal year.
The audit was conducted in accordance with generally accepted industry standards and the auditors issued a letter that contained no findings, meaning the standards have been adhered to by the city, according to Feldman.
The council is also expected to discuss the temporary use permit process and give the green light to making revisions to the temporary use permit process to make it easier.
In May, the Malibu Chamber of Commerce requested revisions to the TUP regulations “to allow more flexibility in the allotment and issuance of permits.”
There were recommended revisions, such as updating what constitutes a temporary event that requires a TUP, increasing the maximum number of permits allowed per year, revising TUP standards from applying to a single property to applying to individual businesses on a property, adding TUP standards for marathon and triathlon events and decreasing the required public noticing from 32 days to 10 days, according to a staff report.
The staff, if directed, will prepare a zone text amendment to change the municipal code and seek a Local Coastal Program Amendment regarding the processing of TUPs.
The planning commission will be scheduled to hear the matter regarding the ZTA and LCPA, according to city planners.

BY SUZANNE GULDIMANN

Nineteenth century American explorer William Clark wrote the words “Ocian in view. O, the joy!” in his journal to commemorate his first sight of the Pacific Ocean. Malibu resident and author Lawrence Clark Powell chose that quote for a small volume of musings on life in Malibu, first published in 1958.
Powell reflected that Clark was “a better explorer than speller” but that he shared the same sense of elation at the sight of the sea. “Ocean in view as I write, our watery front-yard disturbed by the westerly which has been blowing since yesterday, when it swept away the overcast. Close in the water is sandy, then the calm kelp bed, and beyond lies the dark sea with windhorses running wild on its surface,” Powell wrote.
Lawrence Clark Powell, born in 1906, grew up in Southern California and was part of the vibrant Los Angeles literary scene in the 1930s. Powell was University Librarian at UCLA in 1955—where he is credited with increasing the university’s holdings from 280,000 volumes to nearly 3 million—when he and wife Kay Shoemaker moved to Malibu. “It was a kind of magnetic homecoming, our move to Malibu,” Powell wrote, adding that “long background of reading and seeing that motivated the move…plus something else, instinctive, mysterious and right.”
Powell had read descriptions of Malibu in Frederick Rindge’s “Happy Days in Southern California,” and in the poetry of Madeleine Ruthven, but he had also driven Pacific Coast Highway on the day in 1928 that it opened to the public for the first time.
“I drove over it in a topless Hupmobile roadster from Santa Monica to Oxnard…and even then the beaches were withheld by barbed wire fence. I can still recall the sense of discovery I had during that first day in Malibu.”
Ironically, it was the 1950s version of climate change that finally drove the Powells to migrate from West Los Angeles. “The weather seemed to worsen (all changes in weather are blamed on The Bomb, aren’t they?)” Powell wrote. “There was smog all day and its stagnant after-mist by night.”
The Powells exchanged the smog for a panoramic and unspoiled view of the ocean and mountains at the upper end of Broad Beach. “All the hours are lovely in their lights and colors, wind and calm; and if one isn’t gardening or gleaning wood on the beach, swimming or walking, he is content to sit and watch the passage of time over the earth.”
Powell described the abalone that were abundant in the Fifties—“Later at supper we went to the beach to get our supper off the rocks. Prying abalone from the reef is only half the labor required: the other end of the mollusk is almost as firmly fastened to the shell…Freshly caught and sauteed in butter they are delicious and their shells remain, beautiful forever.”
Powell also recounts pleasures like discovering hidden springs in the mountains and ancient oaks; gathering mussels, wild mushrooms, shells and driftwood, and watching the sky, sea and stars.
Not everything was idyllic. Fire and drought were problems then as well as now. “On the coast, seasons merge almost imperceptibly into each other,” Powell wrote. “When the rainy season is regular, then it is easier to know the time of year. When drought comes, how is one to know summer and fall from winter and spring?”
Powell provides a terrifying firsthand account of the 1956 Newton-Hume-Sherwood Fire. The fire, which started in Newton Canyon during 70-90 mph Santa Ana winds on Christmas Day, raged for nearly days, charring 40,000 acres.
The Powells and their neighbors, with the help of two Edison line crew workers, fought to save their homes from the firestorm, armed with shovels and garden hoses. They were fortunate, but many were not. More than 250 homes and structures were destroyed.
Powell’s home was destroyed 20 years later, in the 1978 Kanan Fire. He died in 2001 in Arizona and never returned to Malibu, but his Malibu writings remain a vivid portrait of a place that is both familiar and remote as a vanished Elysium.
“The Chumash were a gentle people, living on shellfish, roots, and acorn meal,” Powell wrote. “We who are carnivorous leave a different residue. Sometimes I wonder who will follow us here, and what they will make of our artifacts—books and discs and Scriptos, and less tangible, though perhaps more lasting, our love for this marine mountain-scape called Malibu.”
“Ocian in View” by Lawrence Clark Powell is currently out of print, but readily available second-hand.

BY ANNE SOBLE

It’s not overstatement to describe Washington, DC as a ghost town between late December and the first week of the new year, so it is not too surprising that there is no formal reply yet to the request by Representative Maxine Waters that the FBI become involved in the case of the 24-year-old Cal State Fullerton honors graduate who reportedly departed from the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station before dawn on Sept. 17 and has been missing for 15 weeks.
Representative Waters has asked the FBI to initiate an investigation into the disappearance of the young black woman, Mitrice Richardson, and the circumstances of her Malibu arrest and subsequent booking and release from Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department custody.
In a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller two weeks ago, Waters said, “Based on reports I have read, there are questions as to whether the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station acted properly in releasing this young woman during the predawn hours without money or transportation, all while she was suffering from what the Los Angeles Police Department’s doctors have concluded to be bipolar disorder.” The LAPD is the lead agency in the search because Richardson is a Los Angeles resident.
Waters, a Democrat, represents the 35th Congressional District, which includes the South Los Angeles area where Richardson lives with her great-grandmother. Richardson, who was preparing to begin substitute teaching and planned to work on a doctorate in clinical psychology, mysteriously vanished after walking out of the Lost Hills Station, located 40 miles from her home, alone, inadequately attired for cold weather, and without money, cell phone or means of transportation at 12:25 a.m. on Sept. 17.
Richardson had been booked on two misdemeanor counts after being placed under citizen’s arrest several hours earlier by personnel at Geoffrey’s restaurant for not paying an $89.51 dinner tab. Her speech and behavior were described as strange by people in the restaurant, but when she was taken to Lost Hills, sheriff’s personnel there determined that she was lucid and there were no grounds to detain her.
However, last month, journal entries found in the woman’s car, which was impounded at time of her arrest—a questionable procedure in its own right—were interpreted by professionals as indicative of extreme fatigue (up to a week of possible sleep deprivation) and other signs of mental stress.
Waters, a member of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, which is responsible for oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, added extra clout to her message when she said she is “concerned about the failure of the FBI Los Angeles Regional Office to investigate the circumstances surrounding Mitrice’s disappearance.”
Waters added that “the FBI has the responsibility to pursue cases implicating federal criminal or civil rights statutes [and] I believe the circumstances and facts of this case warrant bureau involvement.”
She reiterates the request “that the FBI open an investigation into Mitrice’s disappearance and the circumstances surrounding her arrest, detention and release from the custody of the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station.”
FEDERAL PETITION
Bolstering Waters’ request for FBI intervention are the efforts of an online activist group whose concerns include social, economic and criminal justice. Change.org has collected 4277 signatures toward a goal of 5000 signatures on a petition urging state and federal elected and appointed officials to initiate a federal investigation of the Richardson case.
In addition to the effort to “help find Richardson,” the group wants “to ensure that this does not happen to additional persons.” The petition is at the group’s website: www.change.org
JANUARY SEARCH
LAPD Detective Charles Knolls indicated that law enforcement agencies are “planning a search for additional clues in January” in the Malibu/Lost Hills area. He said, “We’re coordinating the search with the Lost Hills Search and Rescue teams and their volunteer resources. The exact date has not been set.”
Richardson is described on the LAPD blog as an “African-American with brown hair and hazel eyes. The 24-year-old is five-feet-five to five-feet-six inches tall and weighs about 135 pounds. She was last seen wearing a dark shirt and blue jeans.”
For more information about the case and search activities, check the website at www.findmitrice.info or contact Dr. Ronda Hampton at 951-660-8031, or LAPD Detectives Charles Knolls or Steven Eguchi at their new office telephone number 213-486-6900.