City Planner Supports Hotel Traffic Light And Parking Lot On Inland Side Of Road
Written by 991KBU on February 28, 2019
Malibu’s city planner has found enough loopholes for the Malibu Beach Inn to move its parking lot across P C H … linked by a traffic light … in downtown Malibu.
In a staff report unveiled yesterday … the city planning director is recommending that the Planning Commission approve the controversial proposal
Under the plan … the hotel will get to build a traffic light on PCH … within a few hundred feet of the existing traffic light at Malibu Pier.
Then … it can build its coveted swimming pool in its parking lot.
A valet service will ferry cars back and forth between between the two parcels … with the valets stopping traffic on PCH at the new traffic light in front of the hotel.
Drivers be ordered by painted “keep clear” signs to stay out of the way for the valets. … to provide the necessary breaks in traffic to allow the valet a safe opportunity to enter and exit the parking lot down the street.
The conversion of the existing median two-way left turn lane into an exclusive left-turn pocket for the hotel would eliminate the existing access to several of the properties located along the ocean side of PCH … so that part of the plan has been cancelled.
City planner Bonnie Blue tells the Planning Commission that the hotel plan complies with the Coastal Commission-approved Local Coastal Program and the Malibu Municipal Code.
And … she says the Planning Department made this recommendation based on substantial evidence in the record.
The city planner thus recommends approval.
But the decision on whether that evidence has been interpreted correctly is not the city staff’s to make.
It is the Planning Commission… and ultimately the city council who will make the call.
And attorneys for the hotel have already asserted in public that they have a property right to install the signal on PCH and move their hotel parking lot across the road … and pan to go to court if the city says no.
