Planning Commission rejects LADWP storage yard above Corral Beach Play

The City of Los Angeles Monday night politely said "up yours" to the City of Malibu Planning Commission, and the Planning Commissioners replied with a polite "pound sand" response back to Los Angeles, last night.

The Malibu Planning Commission voted unanimously to block construction of an LADWP outdoor equipment warehouse and vehicle storage yard on Corral Canyon Road. LADWP wants to put this on the side of the hill above the campground at Corral Beach, right in the heart of Malibu.

A DWP official Monday night insisted that the City of L.A. has the right to ignore Malibu's zoning rules. DWP Pacific Palisades project manager Theodore Zeis said the outdoor laydown yard is essential for the quick rebuilding of the power lines in Pacific Palisades.

And Zeis hinted the whole thing is going to end up in court.

He claimed the governor's executive order suspends the state's environmental laws and Coastal Commission regulations in the fire area, and that this order allows the DWP to build whatever it wants wherever it wants.

Zeis said: "First, the governor's wildfire recovery executive order suspends CEQA and Coastal Act permitting requirements for qualifying reconstruction efforts. The temporary laydown yard directly supports those efforts, and therefore LADWP has independent authority under those orders."

It appears that's not correct. The governor's order applies only to rebuilding housing in the fire areas, not rebuilding commercial or industrial yards. And it only applies to rebuilding projects, not new construction.

Zeis from the DWP also made the claim that state law gives Los Angeles immunity from Malibu's zoning laws. He said: "LADWP is a department of the city of Los Angeles, and under longstanding state law, municipal agencies carry intergovernmental immunity from another city's zoning restrictions."

That also appears to be a questionable legal theory.

It runs into a section of the California Constitution which says that conflicts between two cities are governed by the constitutional home rule authority of the host city. A city operating outside of its boundaries, like Los Angeles, has to obey the host city's police power, like zoning, under the Articles of the California Constitution.

But the DWP official Monday night maintained a legal fiction: "Malibu's zoning requirements cannot be applied to prohibit LADWP's municipal utility operations solely because the land lies within Malibu."

There have been some opinions issued by the California Attorney General that support this DWP legal claim that the city that owns the land is exempt from the local zoning rules of the host city. But the state constitution says otherwise, and that's a lot more powerful than a legal opinion from the state AG.

Malibu's assistant city attorney Monday night, Kellan Martz, called the DWP's bluff: "We would respectfully disagree with how they've characterized this. The governor's order applies to certain utility actions and wildfire related activities.

"A storage yard, in the city's position, our position, does not qualify for that exemption. Where you store things is not the rebuild process."

The city of Los Angeles position here is fairly audacious. It wants to store outdoor equipment and vehicles on a vacant lot that it happens to own, 10 miles outside of the L.A. city limits in the heart of Malibu. DWP says there's no other way for them to store material that's needed to rebuild the electrical system in Pacific Palisades.

Left unsaid by the colossus to the east: the DWP's major West L.A. storage depot is only 12 miles away from Pacific Palisades, in the opposite direction from Malibu, on the 10 freeway at Fairfax.

And trucks traveling back and forth between the Palisades and Fairfax Avenue would not be traveling through Malibu as Malibu tries to deal with PCH damage and houses being rebuilt right next to the road.

The Malibu Planning Commission Monday night acted in the most predictable way possible.

With little discussion and by a 5-0 vote, they turned the utility laydown yard down.

Right now, city zoning rules require DWP to pack up and go away and to clean up the work that was already done by Nov. 29. The DWP, however, is giving all indications it will disobey the zoning rules in Malibu.

This is, of course, why they have lawyers and courtrooms. And if that be the case, the score right now is Malibu 1, LA zero.

In 1970, LA shelved its seven year effort to build a nuclear power plant on the same patch of land where they now want to store big electric power line components, to haul over to Pacific Palisades, because they don't want to put those trucks on Sunset Boulevard in their municipality.