Wish You Were Here: A Transient History of Malibu's Motels

AAA-approved and spectacularly pink—First Lady Mamie Eisenhower's favorite color—inside and out. For a weary motorist, arriving at the Malibu Riviera Motel in 1948, after a drive along the mostly uninhabited Malibu coast, it must have felt like being transported to the Technicolor land of Oz. After decades of neglect, this relic of the road trip-era is now the artfully hipster Native Motel. The owners have embraced the original 1940s ambiance and restored everything to a period feel. Rooms reportedly cost around $200-$400 a night, soon with coffee and waffles served out of an Airstream every morning. But the old Riviera Motel is an exception, because most of Malibu's motel history is lost or changed beyond recognition. This postcard is from the wonderful Eric Weinberg Collection of Matchbooks, Postcards and Ephemera at the Pepperdine University Library's Digital Archive.

Nostalgia for old motels, like most forms of nostalgia, is selective and dishonest. We like to imagine a pure world before the soulless hotel chains took over, a landscape of lovely neon, local charm, and individuality. No doubt this was the case, occasionally, in the 50s and early 60s, but it was only part of the story. —James Lileks

No one cared much about the Great Malibu Motel Extinction of the 1980s and '90s. It was a gradual phenomenon, more like the end of the last ice age than the sudden change precipitated by an asteroid, but rising real estate prices were just as fatal to local guest services in their own small way as the arrival of the asteroid Chicxulub to the dinosaurs. 

Now, when almost all this particular endangered species, famous for its boomerang-patterned formica, heated pools, and signs proclaiming "AAA Approved!" is almost entirely gone, our elected officials in Sacramento suddenly care very much.

The lavish two-story Casa Malibu Motel, built by the Harris family in 1947—the golden year for motels in Malibu, was popular with the Hollywood crowd in the 1950s, when it was at the peak of motel perfection, as well as being a family vacation destination. Today, it's the $1000-$2000-a-night Nobu Ryokan, and still presumably big with the Hollywood set, but no longer accessible to ordinary mortals (those of us without a spare $2K can enjoy a virtual visit here).

Just in time for the opening of the preposterously pricy $2000-a-night Malibu Nobu Ryokan hotel, a new California assembly bill seeks to turn the clock back to the era of the road trip, encouraging motel redevelopment projects and opening up the possibility of using public lands for new hotels, campgrounds, and hostels in the Coastal Zone that would be available to all, not just the boutique set.

Not everyone is enthused about the plan, at least not here in Malibu. That's because the bill as written seems to have several large loopholes that activists fear could generate an unintended building boom in parklands that were saved for conservation, not development. They are also concerned that recreational development in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, including Malibu, no matter how desirable it may appear, would put large numbers of potentially clueless visitors right in the middle of an area with some of the highest fire danger on the continent. Others question the feasibility of bringing back cheap motels. The era of Kerouac has come and gone, they say. The world has changed.

Motels and campgrounds were an outgrowth of early car culture. In a weird way, so were many of our Western National Parks, where the routes through the parks were built to showcase the best vistas to visitors with cars, not to protect resources or offer easy access to hikers. Here's an ad for Red Crown gasoline from 1923, encouraging car owners to embrace "the privileges of the great outdoors," with a scene from a dream camping vacation—frolicking on the sand, a tent on the beach, cooking over a camp stove, the faithful automobile, whitewalls gleaming, waiting to carry the vacationers to their next exciting destination.

The original motel and campground boom all across the county is tied to the history of the automobile. When Mr Ford, aided and abetted by the Automobile Club of America, opened up that new horizon for travel, campgrounds and the new motels—a portmanteau word made out of motor + hotels—sprang up all over, including throughout the Santa Monica Mountains. 

An Automobile Club map from 1915 encourages drivers to explore the Santa Monica Mountains. Topanga Canyon was a popular destination, and campgrounds and cabins cropped up throughout the canyon, recreation replacing agriculture as a cottage industry.

Early 20th century beachgoers had a luxury that has almost vanished today. Entrepreneurial landowners cobbled together tent cabins in Santa Monica Canyon and at Topanga Beach for visitors. Beach shacks, bath houses, and tents popped up all along the coast.

Here's a 1920s postcard from the Eric Weinburg Collection advertising the joys of auto camping at what looks like the beach by Temescal Canyon.

Even as early as the 1880s, when horsepower had a much more literal meaning, beach and canyon camping was a popular activity. A stagecoach catering to summer beachgoers transported intrepid travelers to the Las Flores Inn for the day, and private campgrounds offered a taste of California rancho life to vacationing Angelenos.

The Marquez family's campground in Santa Monica Canyon offered the best of beach and canyon recreation opportunities. This photo, dated 1885, is from the Santa Monica Public Library Image Archives.

The Topanga Ranch Motel, build in the 1930s, was one of the first local hostelries to cater to the motorcar crowd. It grew out of the tents at Cooper's Camp, shown in the postcard, below.

That row of cabins along the road eventually grew into the Topanga Ranch Motel. 

However, ramshackle huts and canvas tents lined the beach from Santa Monica to the Palisades long before there was a Pacific Coast Highway. In fact, there were hotels, cabins, cottages and bath houses all over the coast, followed in the late 1930s by motels, but one long stretch of the coast was of out of reach for vacationers: the old Malibu Rancho. It wasn't until the 1940s that the motel craze reached the coastal enclave.

The Topanga Ranch Motel, shown here in the 1930s, when it was owned by William Randolph Hearst, is a classic example of the early bungalow-style motel. When State Parks acquired the site in 2001, many preservationists cherished the hope that the motel would be restored using the Coastal Commission's program to assess "in lieu" funding to mitigate for the loss of public benefit at other development projects, but the old motel is still shuttered, quietly decaying. 

Here is a Google Street View look at the long-shuttered Topanga Ranch Motel.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Carl's Sea Air Motel—later known as the Sunspot—was one of the first modern motels not just in the Malibu area but in California. This image, from the Santa Monica Public Library Archives.

Carl's Motel—better known as the Sunspot, just east of West Channel Road, was one of the first motels in the area. This 12-room motel exemplified the motor hotel ideal. Completed in 1938, it was designed by well-known Los Angeles architects Alexander Schutt and A. Quincy Jones. 

Despite its decline and ignoble end as a dismal disco dive and house of ill repute in the 1970s, this motel, designed to offer food, accommodation, and gas, was a landmark. In his application to the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission to get the building listed as a historic landmark, preservationist Bradley Weidmaier described the motel as "a brilliantly orchestrated complex." Unfortunately, this motel's architectural significance wasn't enough to save it.

There's nothing left of the old Carl's Motel/Sunspot nightclub complex today. It was torn down to facilitate a park that was never built. All that's on the site now is a massive landslide mitigation project. Image: Google Street View

After Pacific Coast Highway—Roosevelt Highway in those days—was built, and the Rindge family were forced to sell off large chunks of the Malibu Rancho to pay the expenses that piled up during the battle to keep the highway out, more hotels began to pop up, but only after WW II. Gas and tire rationing, curfews and blackout regulations, the military closure at Point Dume, and the general lack of manpower put all kinds of development plans in Mlaibu on hold for the war years.

The Malibu Beach Motel still looks much the same but is currently an office building. Built in 1941, this was the first motel actually in Malibu. It served as something of a general store and gathering place during the difficult war years. This image is from a 1949 ad, once again in the collection of Mr Weinberg. 

The Malibu Beach Motel, once famous for its Hollywood clientele, is now a sedate office building that houses a development company. Image: Google Street View.

Malibu was a modest mecca for motel builders in the 1940s and '50s. Architect Richard Neutra designed the fabled Holiday House for retired director Dudley Murphy in 1947. The Wilcox family built the Malibu Riviera Motel with their own hands, the same year. The other Malibu motels over the next decade ranged from the modernist Malibu Sands to the spectacularly kitchy Tonga-Lei.

The Holiday House, a mid-century modern beach paradise, was designed by architect Richard Neutra shortly after WW II for film director Dudley Murphy.  The Surf Room is still a restaurant—Geoffrey's, but the motel rooms were converted into apartments in the 1980s. The image is an ad from around 1968.

Malibu motel ads from 1949. My mom, who grew up back east, tells me that a patio was a big deal in the 1950s, especially for transplanted or relocated East Coasters and Midwesterners, to whom a sliding glass door to a patio that could be used year round was an almost unimaginable luxury. 

The former "Sea Esta" Motel, now the Malibu M Motel. Image: Google Street View

The Malibu Beach Hotel in its original incarnation in the 1940s, as the Ocean View Motel. It's AAA Approved! Image: Boston Public Library

This motel is still there, too, wonderful 1940s curved corners and all, but it's all apartments now. Image: Google Street View photo.

The Malibu Shores Motel was built in the early 1950s by Betty and Nathaniel Roberts. The October 2, 1953 Malibu Times describes it as "an exceptionally beautiful structure that is a decided architectural credit to the community." It certainly meets all of the criteria for a 1950s motel: turquoise paint, check. Peanut-brittle stone facade, check. Eye-catching motel sign, check. And is it AAA approved? Yes it is. A generation later, it was given a sedate, gray and white make-over and became the Surfrider. This building is currently being remodeled and is expected to open soon in its latest incarnation as the new Malibu Surfrider Motel.

The Tonga-Lei was originally a restaurant and motel. The motel, which had nine tiki-themed rooms that matched the restaurant's over-the-top decor, kept the name when the restaurant became Don the Beachcomber. It's all gone now. 

The Tonga Lei, which opened in 1961 on the site of another somewhat eccentric restaurant—the  Drift Inn, was famous for its Polynesian-themed restaurant and bar, which featured tropical cocktails, flaming torches and genuine carved Tiki gods, but the small motel—it only had nine rooms—attached to the restaurant was also a temple of Tiki decor, resplendent with bamboo furniture. It was replaced in 1987 with a generic three-story, 47-room hotel, touted in an L.A. Times article as "the first new hotel in Malibu in 37 years." 

Alas, there's not a trace of Tiki kitch left at the Malibu Beach Inn, not even a bizarre tropical drink or two on the dinner menu for old time's sake, just three stories of luxurious but bland respectability. Image: Google Street View

The Malibu Sands Motel is a strip mall today. It was one of the last motels to be built in Malibu, and one of the largest. The original building was designed by noted mid-century modern architect Alfred T. Gilman in 1957. The Malibu Sands included "bachelor apartments," in addition to motel rooms. This postcard is also from the wonderful collection of Eric Weinberg at the Pepperdine University Library's Digital Archive.

"Nothing as fine within 400 miles," boasts this ad from 1958.

The Albatross Motel began life in the late 1940s as the Malibu Movie Colony Motel and burned down in 1963. It was never rebuilt. It has a colorful reputation that's difficult now to substantiate, and the site is reputed to be haunted—another claim that is difficult to prove. This location beautifully summarizes the trajectory of the American motel—from modern convenience to decay and from there to oblivion. Only five of the 12 motels in and around Malibu we discussed today are still in business as hotels. This is another postcard from the Eric Weinberg Collection.

There were others. The Las Tunas Isle Motor Hotel, which advertised in the Malibu Times for a couple of years in the late 1940s before turning into an apartment house. The Malibu-adjacent Santa Inez Inn on Sunset Blvd., which served delightful Sunday brunches on the patio by the pool, The Malibu Country Inn, which is said to have build in that great year for Malibu roadside motels, 1947, and has certainly been at Zuma for as long as anyone in my family can remember under one name or another, but which appears never to have produced a collectable postcard or matchbook to help refresh the memory. And the quaint shops at the original Malibu Country Mart that were once motel rooms. Next time you're there for a sandwich at John's Garden take a second look: the popular playground was the pool in the center of the motel.

Not many people remember it now, but this quirky, Tiki-themed apartment near Topanga Beach was build as the Las Tunas Isle Motor Inn by the Zimmerman family in 1946. Image: Google Street View

During the peak motel boom there was a ridiculously high ratio of hotel rooms to residents and more than enough to accommodate visitors. Many motels also offered inexpensive accommodations for summer employees and struggling writers, but there were plans to build more and more and more. Eventually the people of the community, tired of the county's vision for an L.A. version of Miami Beach, began to push back. 

Efforts to build an enormous motel complex across from Zuma Beach—110 rooms, a theater, a restaurant and shops—were firmly and resolutely defeated by residents in 1971. 

"Malibu has plenty of motels," local architect Ed Niles told the Los Angeles Times in February 1971.  

Fear that Malibu was going to be transformed into the county's vision of a resort community full of marinas and wall-to-wall hotels wasn't just hyperbole, it was one of the rallying cries of the second big push for incorporation, as this 1980 L.A. Times headline reveals. 

Today, with millions of visitors annually, there are concerns that there are not enough accommodations. However, what the proponents of AB 250, the assembly bill that inspired this road trip to the past, are seeking is affordable accommodations, and that era seems unlikely to return.

For decades the piece of land opposite what is now Pepperdine University was zoned for a hotel. It's now supposed to become a cemetery on the argument that a graveyard is somehow visitor serving. The Coastal Commission let the City of Malibu rezone the property next to Malibu Bluffs Park from a hotel to an exclusive, gated subdivision, in exchange for a $4 million in lieu fee. The problem with that is, $4 million doesn't go very far, and that property is now permanently off limits to the public the commission is supposed to be advocating for.

Low-cost, visitor serving amenities like hotels are supposed to be a priority for the commission, but they haven't always been successful protecting and retaining existing resources of this type, let alone encouraging new ones. In fairness, no matter how much we may want and need affordable overnight accommodations at the beach, no matter how many hotels and hostels and campgrounds the assembly bill might facilitate within the constraints of environmentally sensitive habitat, there is probably no way to ever meet the need in Malibu without destroying what makes the community special.

Tents on the beach at Santa Monica Canyon in the late 19th century. Image: Santa Monica Library

According to the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s Lifeguard Division, beach attendance throughout Los Angeles County has climbed from 27 million in 1967, to nearly 73 million in 2014, with an all-time high of 76 million in 2012. A huge number of those beachgoers are headed to Malibu. In 2013, we had an estimated 7.4 million summer visitors. To put that into perspective, the total number of visitors to the state of Hawaii in 2016 was 8.9 million. When one small coastal town with a population of 13,000 and less than 6000 full time residents attracts that many visitors a year it's no wonder hotels can charge $400, $1000, $2000 a night. What incentive is there to offer rooms for $100?

Fortunately for those of us who like to camp and can't afford a boutique experience, there are still plenty of campgrounds. You can still camp on the beach at Thornhill Broome State Beach, or in a rustic canyon steps from the beach at Leo Carrillo State Park and Sycamore Canyon, just like the earliest visitors to the area. 

A brochure for the long-vanished  Moel y Gan Resort in Topanga, the "Ideal Mountain Resort of Southern California." Image: CSUN Digital Library.

The privately-owned Malibu RV Park and Campground offers sites from $70-$200 a night an easy walk from Corral Beach and Solstice and Corral Canyon Parks, while area residents, channeling the entrepreneurial instincts of an earlier generation, offer backyard "glamping," a portmanteau word even more awkward than "motel." They also offer holidays in yurts, cabins, and Air Streams, at locations all over the Santa Monica Mountains and coast. Like camping facilities in and around national parks all over the country, these facilities fill up fast during peak season and are often mostly empty in the winter.

None of those things, even the state park campgrounds, is as affordable as it would have been in the 1950s, neither is the car and the gas required to get one there. Time passes, and is passing, and is past, the poet says. The era of the cheap, clean, convenient motor hotel is over and probably isn't coming back. And like James Lileks noted, nostalgia for old motels, like most forms of nostalgia, is selective. Expecting that era to return in a time of $2000-a-night boutique hotels and $45 million beach houses is wonderfully optimistic, whether it is also realistic remains to be seen.

You can read the text of AB 250 here, and also follow its progress through the committee and appropriations process. It's important to note that it apples to the entire Coastal Zone, not just to Malibu.

This is what has always drawn visitors to Malibu, the roadside motels and overpriced boutique hotels are just a means to this end. This view, whether we stay for an hour, a week, or a lifetime, belongs to all of us, Let's hope it will always be protected, cherished, and open to everyone. Wish you were here. 

A Walk in the Park

Bluffs Park Open Space is currently at the center of the 2016 Malibu City Council election debate, but not for the reasons one might think. All Photos © 2016 S. Guldimann

October in Malibu Bluffs Open Space Park offers vistas of dusty golden fields and wind-swept blue sea and sky. The meadowlarks arrived this week, from wherever they spend their summers. Cold air collects at the bottom of the ravines over night and lingers into the morning hours, offering early walkers a taste of winter and the concentrated fragrance of laurel sumac, sagebrush, and skunk musk—a sort of distillation of autumn in Malibu.

The open space is a small park—just 83 acres. One rarely encounters more than a few other visitors. You might meet a wedding party taking photos, or neighbors walking their dogs. If you are there early enough or late enough you might see a family of coyotes hunting mice in the meadow, or the shy elusive bobcat that lives in the canyon. There are almost always raptors in the dead eucalyptus trees by the highway, and in a wet year the park is full of flowers, some of them common, some rare. So how did this small, quiet place end up being at the center of a maelstrom of campaign accusations during the 2016 city council race? Let's take a look.

A field of Catalina mariposas dance in the wind at Malibu Bluffs Park Open Space. This flower, which can lie dormant for years until conditions are right and then burst into bloom resembling the butterfly it is named for, is a California species of special concern.

Although Malibu Bluffs Park is a small area, it was a top priority on the Coastal Commission's first acquisitions list in 1976, together with the Point Dume Headlands. Nearly 100 acres on the bluff were purchased by the state in 1979 with the first bond money available for coastal conservation.

The city was able to buy 10 of those acres from the state as a permanent home for our community's ball fields, after the local Little League was forced to move out of Malibu Lagoon. Through a complex deal that money was used to purchase King Gillette Ranch in the heart of the Santa Monica Mountains, the ball fields got to stay on the bluff, Malibu was able to build the Michael Landon Community Center, and the remaining 83 acres of open space were transferred from State Parks to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to manage, which it did by mostly leaving the property alone, until the plan for placing campsites on the site emerged, kicking off a massive battle.

The California Coastal Commission was extremely reluctant to allow the existing ballfields to be placed in their current location, it seems unlikely that they are going to let them be doubled and placed here, no matter what they city wants:

 In the aftermath of that battle, and with a different city council at the helm in Malibu, the City of Malibu traded its 590-acre Charmlee Wilderness Park to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy for Bluffs Open Space. The swap is still not complete. Both parties agreed to a five-year exchange to determine if the properties could be developed in the way desired.

For Charmlee, that means overnight camping facilities to accomodate hikers traveling the Coastal Slope Trail and also campsites for disabled parkgoers.

At Malibu Bluff Parks Open Space, the City of Malibu is seeking four baseball fields, an aquatic center, a skatepark, a dog park, an amphitheater, basketball courts, a tot lot, lawn areas, a community/visitor center and all of the necessary infrastructure to make that a reality, including ancillary structures like pool pumps, restrooms, batting cages, storage sheds, parking areas, driveways and at least one new entrance from Pacific Coast Highway.

This is the city's proposed plan for Bluffs Park Open Space. The orange dotted line indicates the ESHA—Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area—boundary. Almost all of the proposed development goes right up to that line. If the Coastal Commission required the project to meet the ESHA buffer requirement mandated by the City of Malibu's Local Coastal Program, some of the facilities planned will have to be scaled back. Here's a link to the city's ESHA designations. And here's what the city's laws say about ESHA buffer for coastal sage scrub and chaparral habitat: "New development shall provide a buffer of sufficient width to ensure that no required fuel modification area will extend into the ESHA and that no structures will be within 100 feet of the outer edge of the plants that comprise the [ESHA] plant community." 

Here's the same map with red used to mark a rough approximation of the areas the city would be limited to build in if they are required to meet the 100 feet of ESHA buffer requirement. Both entrances to the 83-acre park are either fully in ESHA or in the buffer zone. So is most of the central parking lot and the entire skatepark. 

A master plan has been developed that reconfigures the city's existing 10-acre Bluffs Park and incorporates a nearly two-acre parcel that will be donated by the developer of the adjacent five-house subdivision, as well as mapping out the amenities the city is seeking to construct in the open space portion of the park. 

The riparian habitat on the edge of the current Bluffs Park parking lot is problematic. It would become the driveway for the central mesa's athletic complex in the city's plan, but is 100 percent ESHA, which means it can't be developed under the city's own Local Coastal Program. It seems unlikely that the Parks and Recreation Commission is going to get everything on its wish list without a struggle. Even if the Coastal Commission approves the plan as is, the Sierra Club has already gone on record opposing the city's plan. Their argument is that the park was purchased by the people of the state of California with bond money earmarked expressly for open space and that a municipal recreation complex does not meet that definition. Appeals and lawsuits appear inevitable.

The plan includes relocating and replacing the Michael Landon Center with a new, larger visitor/community center, moving the two existing baseball diamonds to the central section of the open space park and adding  a Pony League field and a softball field, and rearranging the current field area to accommodate three soccer or mixed use fields.

You can see that the city's plan follows the outlines of the Conservancy's camping proposal areas fairly closely, but with one major difference. Campsites don't require the same ESHA and fire setbacks that other types of development do. Further complicating the issue are those little blue, yellow and green squares, which represent the location of special concern species that require extra protections. The blue dots represent the mariposa lilies that are a special concern species and the tot lot and lawn area proposed by the city are practically on top of them. The tot lot is also on top of a Chumash cultural resource. Somebody didn't bother to look at the records before plunking down amenities. 

The problem with this plan is that when the Conservancy wanted to place campsites at Bluffs Park, the city went through great lengths to argue that the whole park was Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area, where nothing can be built. The city attorney has stated that the park is ESHA on the record to the Coastal Commission and the city's official overlay map showing ESHA supports that.

This is the official ESHA overlay map for the section of Malibu from Corral Canyon to the Malibu Pier. Bluffs Park is the green blob under the word "Coast." The only parts that aren't mapped as ESHA are the current ballfields and the portion of the western mesa where the aquatic facility is proposed. 

Update: A reader pointed out that a much stricter 200-foot ESHA buffer is required for mapped ESHA, according to section 4.4.2 of the city's Local Implementation Zone. 

Now that the city wants to build amenities on the park the argument is that there isn't that much ESHA after all. However, ESHA isn't the only concern. Bluffs Park Open Space has plenty of interesting geologic features, including numerous landslide areas and a large section of the Malibu Coast Fault. 

That big black line is the Malibu Coast Fault. It's the reason GE, which owned the property in the 1960s, was never able to build a facility on the site, and why plans for an Alcoa tract development were scraped. The orange lines are landslides. The arrows show the direction of the slides. The notation Tm refers to the Monterey Formation that is poking up through the alluvial soil. The mark that looks like an upside-down teeter-totter in the middle of the circle around the Monterey Formation indicates the direction and angle of the upright bedding—80 degrees in this location. The presence of Tv—Conejo Volcanics, and Tr—Trancas Formation (mostly marine shales) intruding through the alluvial soils hints at a turbulent past caused by ancient floods and deformation from the earthquake fault. This image is from the SMMC's Environmental Impact Report for the site and shows the proposed campsites. The city has not yet completed its EIR.

Here are a couple of photos of the bluff-side landslide areas for a visual reference. No arrows or dotted lines needed.

Now let's take a look at this quote from a letter to the editor that ran in a recent issue of the Malibu Times:


"...If the slate is elected, they will constitute a majority vote of council and, as promised, will kill any community-supported plans for Bluffs Park for the next four years. By then, the swap with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy will have expired and the conservancy will once again have ownership and control of Bluffs Park.

Most residents are unaware that in 2010, the Coastal Commission approved the conservancy’s plans to add 35 campsites to Bluffs Park. Therefore, by “stopping the swap” the “Band of Three,” commonly referred to as the slate, will have succeeded in eliminating much-needed sports fields and other recreational amenities for all Malibu and, instead, provided us with a regional campground in the heart of our beloved town. What a horrible thought."

The slate refers to City Council candidates Skylar Peak, Rick Mullen and Jefferson Wagner.  The author of this letter appears to be unaware that the Coastal Commission, not the city council, will have the final say on what can built at Bluffs Park. He also appears unaware that the city, not the Conservancy, has the final say on whether the park can be used for campsites. 

Perhaps he is also unaware that Rick Mullen played a major role in the incredibly difficult legal battle to ensure that the city retained the right to make that determination. You can read about it in Rick's own words here. 

Bluffs Park has become an increasingly popular destination for wedding parties. This couple and their photographer probably didn't pick this park for its recreational facilities.

The letter quoted above is just one of several spurious attacks on these three candidates over Bluffs Park. None of these letters mention the property's constraints, or that even if the ballfields and the skatepark are off the table because of the environmental constraints, the city council could still decide that the prospect of athletic facilities on the western mesas is worth pursuing. It's even possible that the city might keep the park as a—what a novel concept—open space, and seek a flatter, less controversial, less geologically active and less environmentally sensitive area to build the other athletic facilities.

You know what would happen if the swap were to fall apart? And no, the answer isn't "the end of the world" the way the letter writer and his friends seem to think. Instead, Malibu would take back Charmlee Wilderness Park, one of the most beautiful places in the Santa Monica Mountains, with 590 acres of ancient oak groves, spectacular ocean views, dramatic rock formations, and miles of trails. I can think of worse things. If the swap is made permanent, the Conservancy has plans to use Charmlee for a campground, but deed restrictions that run with the land ensure that the areas not used for camping will remain wilderness.

There is nothing wrong with recreational facilities. Every community needs places were residents of all ages can participate in activities like organized sports and art and enrichment classes, but the location for those amenities needs to be appropriate. It's great the city has taken the time to collect community input on Bluffs, and that they are currently going through the same process at our newly acquired Trancas Fields Park, but the land and the resources on it must ultimately dictate the use. At Bluffs, one could argue that we appear to have created a wish list full of wonderful things but forgot to start with the physical constraints of the site. It's like buying a fantastic piece of furniture at an estate sale and only realizing that it doesn't fit through the front door when you get it home. That's why an environmental impact report and the Coastal Commission approval process is so important. And it is also why electing the right city council to represent us is critical. 

There are currently two baseball fields and a multi-use/soccer field at Malibu Bluffs Park. The desire for more recreational facilities goes all the way back to the 1960s, when Malibu (it wasn't a city yet) was promised Little League fields next to the proposed nuclear power plant in Corral Canyon, and a swimming pool heated with the sea water that would be pumped in to cool the reactor, too (what could possibly have gone wrong?). 

The author of the letter is correct when he states that the "Band of Three" would ensure a council majority. From the perspective of conservationists and keepers of Malibu's history, this would be a good thing, because Peak, Mullen, and Wagner have not only vowed to uphold the Mission Statement, they all have a documented history of actually doing so that has been chronicled in the local media.

This beautiful vista includes many of the elements that make turning Bluffs Parks into a recreation center a problem: landslides, erosion, the protected mariposa lilies, precarious cliffs, and the earthquake fault. It also reveals another major problem. That green field in the left corner is the western mesa. It's completely isolated from the rest of the park by Marie Canyon. To build the proposed aquatic center there would require a new entrance off of Pacific Coast Highway at John Tyler Way. An entrance located right on the edge of ESHA, within the 100-foot ESHA buffer. There was a time when the Valley of Yosemite National Park had tennis courts and other recreational facilities. The culture has changed as the park service has realized the focus needs to be on nature. Perhaps its time Malibu grows up, too.

Regardless of who is elected in November, the Malibu City Council, not the Conservancy, has the final say on camping at Malibu Bluffs Park. Even if the swap doesn't come to pass and the city reclaims Charmlee and hands Bluffs back to the Conservancy, any camping facilities that the SMMC proposes for Bluffs Park would have to be approved by the city. 

In both scenarios, the California Coastal Commission has a key role in determining what can be built, and because the proposed development falls under the designation of "public works project" it can be appealed to the Coastal Commission if residents or environmental organizations have concerns that they feel were not adequately addressed by the city. 

We've talked a lot about the Malibu Mission Statement this election cycle, but this is exactly the kind of situation that document is intended to address. Does the proposed development meet the goals of the Mission Statement? If it doesn't, can it be rethought, redesigned, scaled back? For too long, the city has relied on variances to make things fit, and it has fallen to residents and environmental organizations to appeal these patched together projects to the Coastal Commission. 

City officials discuss their plans for the park shortly after the swap was announced. They are standing in the middle of California perennial grassland habitat, on top of the hill created by the earthquake fault out of stone from the Monterey Formation. This group was comprised entirely of well-meaning city officials with an enthusiasm for sports. No one thought to include scientists in the discussion. Taking the environmental and geologic constraints of the park more seriously might have helped prevent headaches with the Coastal Commission and the environmental community later. 

Camping may not belong on Bluffs Park, but it's time we stopped thinking of it as "horrible." It's especially discouraging when appointed officials cling to this mindset. A city-owned campground would be a good way to ensure low cost visitor serving amenities are available in Malibu on our terms, with no fires and a year-round live in camp host to keep an eye on things. In other coastal communities this has been a successful way to meet the needs of visitors and even raise revenue. Maybe we aren't there yet, but it would be nice if this was a conversation we could eventually have. 

The statement about "eliminating much-needed sports fields and other recreational amenities for all Malibu and, instead, provided us with a regional campground in the heart of our beloved town" isn't based in fact. It's just election scare mongering. That's why its so important to listen to what the candidates say, and more importantly what they have actually done, not what's said about them.

Here's a reminder of what makes Bluffs Park such an incredibly special place for residents and visitors, and why the City of Malibu's Mission Statement proclaims Malibu "a unique land and marine environment and residential community whose citizens have historically evidenced a commitment to sacrifice urban and suburban conveniences in order to protect that environment and lifestyle, and to preserve unaltered natural resources and rural characteristics."