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By Kenneth R. Weiss and Amanda Covarrubias
Los Angeles Times
June 9, 2005
The turf battles over Malibu's oceanfront tend to be as
predictable as the spring tides as property owners and
beachgoers contest for control of the sand.
This year, the tussle over what is public and what is private
has taken a surprising turn with property owners bringing in
heavy equipment to scoop up tons of public beach and pile it
onto their property.
The battlefront is again Broad Beach, where skip loaders have
erected a massive ridge of sand between the ocean and the
community of 108 beachfront homes that has been in settlement
talks over public access issues with the California Coastal
Commission.
Until now, the dispute has been largely over homeowners'
rights to put up private-property signs in the sand and employ
security guards on all-terrain vehicles to shoo visitors off
dry sand.
But the arrival of earthmoving machinery has raised a new
array of issues.
On Wednesday, Coastal Commission officials ordered the
homeowners association to immediately halt the use of heavy
equipment that has been pushing wet sand from the state-owned
intertidal zone up the beach toward the houses since June 1
without a state permit.
The commission's staff, in a nine-page letter, explained that
the un-permitted grading has harmed wildlife, including
grunion, small fish that spawn on Southland beaches this time
of year. The removal of sand also has lowered the profile of
the public beach so that "public access is cut off by
wave run-up and standing water," the commission's letter
said.
Marshall Grossman, a Broad Beach homeowner and lawyer, said
the intent was not to block public access, but simply to
restore the sandy dunes in front of the homes that eroded
during last winter's storms.
"When that happens, homeowners bring their own sand back
to the dunes or bring in replacement sand from the outside in
order to restore the dune areas," Grossman said. "It
doesn't interfere with public access at all because the dunes
are simply restored to what they were."
Grossman, a former coastal commissioner, said the work was
done in accordance with a permit from Los Angeles County's
Department of Beaches and Harbors. He blamed some of the
erosion on large storm drains that channel water from nearby
hills and "blows out the dunes."
Homeowners can't expect any help from the government that
created the problem, he said, so they have to help themselves.
"Any sand being moved back is simply sand coming off the
dunes in the first place," he said.
The dispute over sand is only the latest chapter in a
long-running clash over public access and the private-property
rights of Broad Beach homeowners, including celebrities Goldie
Hawn, Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman and Danny DeVito.
The commission's staff intervened after beachgoers complained
about earthmovers on the 1.1-mile stretch of beach that
created a sand berm as high as 8 feet in places.
"The unmitigated nerve of this is staggering," said
Richard Menna, a kite-surfing instructor from the San Fernando
Valley. He saw bulldozers on the beach while kite surfing
Monday at nearby Zuma County Beach. "I know people who've
gotten tickets for just picking up a few rocks on state
beaches. There must be thousands of tons of sand taken from
public property."
Lisa Haage, the Coastal Commission's chief of enforcement,
said she was shocked by the land grab. She said she has been
in nearly daily settlement talks with Grossman over removing
the "Private Property, Do not Trespass" signs posted
in the middle of the beach.
The commission, established decades ago to protect public
beach access, demanded last July that homeowners remove the
signs and discontinue motorized beach patrols. The commission
has received more complaints from the public about
mistreatment on Broad Beach than any place else along
California's 1,150-mile coastline.
The brouhaha at Broad Beach is different from skirmishes over
public access at other beaches, such as the newly opened
pathway a few miles down the coast at DreamWorks SKG
co-founder David Geffen's Malibu beach house. The dispute in
that case was over a "vertical" easement, which is
an access way across private property to allow the public to
get from the nearest road to the shoreline.
By contrast, getting to Broad Beach is easy. Two county-owned
pathways are clearly marked by chains, steering the public to
the water.
The fight there, instead, has centered on the unmarked mean
high tide line that separates private property from state
tidelands, which are public. In addition, 52 of the 108 lots
have "lateral" easements that run along the shore,
often allowing the public to spread their towels on a
25-foot-wide strip of dry sand above the mean high tide.
The regrading, Haage said, has tossed Broad Beach into legal
murky waters. Much of what was considered public beach is now
underwater at high tide or subject to a constant run-up of
waves that would make sunbathing and picnicking impossible.
"Either there is no public access, or the public access
has now shifted onto their backyards and onto their
decks," Haage said. "I don't think this was their
intent. Ironically, our discussions have been about how to
have public access without impinging on their privacy or
having people right in their backyards."
The letter issued Wednesday by the commission ordered an
immediate halt to grading, and it informed Grossman and other
homeowners that the board would seek a permanent "cease
and desist" order and an order to restore the beach.
The
grading, the letter said, "coincided with one of the
first grunion runs of the seasons…. The eggs were very
likely destroyed by your activity. More significant is the
fact that the habitat was altered in a way that will certainly
reduce the breeding success of grunion that continue to spawn
on this beach."
Karen Martin, a marine biology professor at Pepperdine
University who has studied grunion at Broad Beach and
elsewhere, said the wave action reflected from the berm
probably would wash grunion eggs out of the sand before they
were ready to hatch. "They probably wouldn't survive if
they are washed out too soon," she said.
The commission letter also said the earthmovers destroyed the
habitat of many sand-dwelling worms, crabs and insects that
provide food for shorebirds.
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