FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Owners of Malibu Mansions Cry, ‘This Sand Is My Sand’

By TIMOTHY EGAN

MALIBU, Calif., Aug. 23 ˜
It started as another golden California day, the shoreline aglow in the
haloed light of midmorning. Rob LeMond was teaching children in his surfing
camp, passing on nearly a half-century of knowledge about riding the waves
of the Pacific.

    Then
a nearby homeowner complained that Mr. LeMond’s surfing students had crossed
the line onto his beach property. The sheriff was called. A long argument
followed over which strip of sand belonged to the public and which was
private.

    “Finally,
this homeowner turned to me and said something I thought I’d never hear
on a California beach,” said Mr. LeMond, 54, of Malibu. “He
said he did not like to look out his window and see people swimming, because
it blocked his view.”

    Skirmishes
over surf and sand have become particularly intense up and down the Southern
California coast this summer.

    To some
people, the fight is about a California birthright: public access to every
inch of the state’s 1,160-mile shoreline. By law, there is no such thing
as private beach in California. In a state where 80 percent of the 34 million
people live within an hour of the coast, it is no small fight.

    Others
see a gold coast of hypocrisy. Some of Hollywood’s and the Democratic Party’s
biggest contributors to liberal causes, like David Geffen, have turned
into conservative property-rights advocates because the battle is taking
place in their sandy backyards.

    “The
real issue here is money,” said Steve Hoye, the leader of a nonprofit group,
Access for All, and an active Democrat.

    “These
people who live on the beach here think that the public cannot be trusted
to walk or swim in front of these million-dollar houses,” Mr. Hoye said.

    A court
fight, initiated by Mr. Geffen, the entertainment mogul, could take the
question of beach access well beyond the shores of Malibu. Last month,
he filed suit seeking to block public access to a narrow walkway that goes
by his Malibu compound.
He promised access 19
years ago, but the path has never been opened, and Mr. Geffen now says
it would be unsafe, dirty and impractical to allow people to walk by his
home to the beach.

    Mr. Geffen
contends in the lawsuit that the access way amounts to a “taking of property
without compensation,” an argument that conservatives have used in environmental
fights for years. If the suit is successful, it could make it much harder
for state and federal agencies to open paths to public beaches throughout
the United States, or even to acquire open space for wildlife or recreation,
some experts say.

    “This
could keep the public away from a lot of beaches,” said Robert Ritchie,
director of research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, who is writing
a book on beach culture. “And because a very significant percentage of
the United States population now lives in counties facing the ocean, the
pressure for public access has become enormous. At the same time, you have
these homeowners fighting to keep the hordes back.”

    The stand
taken by beachfront owners here in Malibu, long a Democratic Party stronghold,
has infuriated another sector of party supporters ˜ environmentalists.

    “Here
you have the superrich wanting to have a private beach in a state that
decided long ago it would not allow any private beaches,” said Carl Pope,
executive director of the Sierra Club. “It’s a huge land grab. By blocking
access, they want to lock up the coast.”

    Further
complicating the issue, a prominent environmental philanthropist, Wendy
McCaw, has vowed to take her lawsuit against beach access to the United
States Supreme Court, making many of the same arguments as Mr. Geffen.

    Ms. McCaw,
the billionaire owner of The Santa Barbara News-Press, is trying to block
access to a 500-foot strip of beach below her 25-acre estate on a bluff
in Santa Barbara County. The easement was granted by a previous owner,
and Ms. McCaw says it does not apply to her. She has already paid $460,000
in fines in her fight to prevent access. She says if the state is going
to require an access path from her private property, then she should be
compensated.

    “There
needs to be more effort toward protecting the embattled wildlife calling
our beaches home, rather than focusing on how to pack more humans with
their destructive ways into those sensitive habitats,” Ms. McCaw said.

    In most
states, beaches that are covered by water at high tide but are relatively
dry at low tide are public. The entire West Coast falls under this mean
high tide doctrine. But some states, notably New York, Massachusetts and
Maine, are more restrictive, allowing fences in the water and private ownership
of tidelands.

    California
voters, in a populist campaign 30 years ago, took the additional step of
guaranteeing “access” to beaches, and empowered the California Coastal
Commission to fight on the public’s behalf.

    Since
then, the state has reached more than 1,300 access deals with private property
owners, but many of those have a time limit and are set to expire within
a few years.

    “Development
shall not interfere with the public right of access to the sea,” reads
a section of the California Coastal Act.

    Beachfront
owners in Malibu have surveyed the tide lines and posted signs warning
people that it is trespassing to walk within a zone they have claimed from
their houses to the ocean. The coastal commission says these private surveys
are meaningless because the definition of what a public beach is changes
daily, with the tides.

    Still,
homeowners
in parts of Malibu have hired private security forces to roam the beach
on three-wheeled vehicles, herding people away from areas they consider
private property.

    A 1987
Supreme Court ruling, Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, limited
the commission’s authority to insist on public access, saying it had power
only over new developments. Mr. Geffen and Ms. McCaw are trying to expand
the Nollan ruling.

    Mr. Geffen’s
spokesman, Andy Spahn, said the Nollan ruling should be applied retroactively
to Mr. Geffen. Mr. Spahn said the public access promise Mr. Geffen made
in 1983 was “extorted” from him as a condition to expand his beach property
with maid quarters and other improvements.

    Mr. Spahn
also said he wanted to start a debate about the “beachgoing experience”
of the public.

    “We think
this is the wrong place for access,” Mr. Spahn said, referring to the path
next to Mr. Geffen’s house. “People are looking for safety, for bathrooms,
for lifeguards. They’re not going to want to cross four lanes of highway,
carrying beach furniture.”

    But the
coastal commission says that it has granted hundreds of access points that
are no more than footpaths next to mansions, and that they operate without
lifeguards or bathrooms and have few problems.

   
The path by Mr. Geffen’s estate is blocked by a locked gate. In front of
the house is a 275-foot stretch of beach, which is open to the public at
low tide, but requires a 20-minute hike to reach now.

    “What
David Geffen is doing is simply breaking his promise,” said Sara Wan, chairwoman
of the coastal commission. “He has a very nice stretch of beach in front
of his house, and it belongs to the public.”

    The city
of Malibu, a 27-mile strip of beach castles and hillside homes along each
side of the Pacific Coast Highway with a population of 13,000, has joined
Mr. Geffen in his lawsuit.

    Jeff
Jennings, the mayor of Malibu, said the city was concerned about safety
and garbage pickup if the access point at Mr. Geffen’s house was not properly
maintained by Access for All, the group that has been granted the right
to manage the pathway should it ever be opened.

    “I have
no interest in keeping the public off public land,” Mr. Jennings said.
“But most people who come to the beaches are not experts in water safety.
It can be a highly dangerous situation.”

    Veteran
surfers, who rely on the narrow public paths to get to some of the best
waves of the Pacific, say they do not need lifeguards or bathrooms. But
they would like to bring back an earlier era.

    “In the
old days, it was live and let live,” said Kurt Lampson, a surfing instructor
who grew up on Malibu’s beaches. “Now you got these guards going around
saying sit here, don’t walk there. It’s depressing.”