“I don’t think the few in Malibu should be sacrificed for the many.”
- Angela Lansbury, sometime in the 1960s

It’s nice to see some attitudes never change.

If you had some erosion on your property, you’d know better than to send a bulldozer to a park next door to push some dirt your way, wouldn’t you?

Not if you’re a wealthy Malibu resident and your real goal is to destroy the public portion of the beach in front of your house. Check out this photo in the Los Angeles Times showing the damage residents’ bulldozers are doing to Broad Beach in Malibu.

As detailed in the LA Times, there are two unsavory aspects to this:

1) there are public easements all along the beach, so the residents — who have never liked ‘normal people’ in front of their houses — are pushing sand off the public portion of the beach onto the private part. The result, according to the Times: “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.” Perhaps now the commoners will stay at Zuma where they belong.

2) this destroys the beach’s ecology: the Times reports “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. (A Coastal Commission cease-and-desist) letter also said the earthmovers destroyed the habitat of many sand-dwelling worms, crabs and insects that provide food for shorebirds.”

Who is doing this? Residents of Broad Beach reportedly include Dustin Hoffman (31054 or 31045 Broad Beach Rd.), Goldie Hawn & Kurt Russell (30804 Broad Beach Rd), Pierce Brosnan (31663 Broad Beach Rd), Eddie Van Halen & Valerie Bertinelli (31736 Broad Beach Rd.), Danny DeVito (31030 or 31020 Broad Beach Road) plus Robert De Niro, Sly Stallone, Mel Gibson, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Redford.

Many would have you believe they are committed environmentalists. Last year Hoffman was guest of honor at Hollywood Ocean Night 2004; DeVito promotes solar power; and Brosnan helps the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The 90265 zip code gave 75% of its political contributions to the Democratic party, which believes itself to be the environmental party.

But it sounds like that commitment comes from the checkbook and peer pressure and not from any real beliefs. One suspects that once Broad Beach’s denizens buy a Prius they feel like they’ve done their duty for the planet for the year. How else to explain their decision to sacrifice a public beach, and the animals that rely on it, in order to keep out the citizens of California?

[PS Mickey Kaus noted Saturday 6/11 that this is a great local story -- but the LA Times mysteriously ran it on page B-3 and has not followed up. Marc Cooper also has an excellent post.]

[See our follow-up post here.]

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Other resources:

• Our earlier post on David Geffen finally fulfilling a 22 year-old deal to grant access in front of his Malibu house
• Coastal Commission PDF of Broad Beach Public Access
• Google Map of Broad Beach

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2005 at 11:38 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under California Schemin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.