Planning Commission to weigh illegal Point Dume structure Play

A controversial zoning issue involving an illegal structure on Point Dume goes before the Planning Commission Monday. The owners of a house on Boniface Drive took out permits years ago to build a storage room. What they actually built was a separate house without permits — almost a thousand square feet, two stories high, with an atrium and an internal mezzanine. It's 22 feet high, 2,500 square feet — a heck of a storage area.

Now the owners are using Senate Bill 9, the law that allows auxiliary dwelling units, to try to get an after-the-fact permit. City staff has come up with nine reasons for the Planning Commission to vote no. Any one of those reasons could be used independently to reject the application, and all of them circle around gross violations of the city's zoning laws and the state's coastal plan for Malibu: too tall, too big, too crowded, too big for the neighborhood, too much density, in a very high fire risk zone.