June 9, 2003
Malibu City Council23815
Stewart Ranch RoadMalibu, CA 90265
Re: Birenbaum Family Residence, 25306 Malibu Road, Malibu, CA 90265
Dear City Council member,
Our family, including our son Joshua, now a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point, has lived in here in our home on Malibu Road for the past twenty-three years. As you are probably aware, the City staff and the City prosecutors, Dapeer, Rosenblit & Litvak, have obtained an order to force us to vacate our home. Since you have expressed your support of the members of our armed forces, we are making this appeal to you personally in order to attempt to find a satisfactory resolution of the current dispute regarding the alleged "unsafe and unsanitary" condition of our family home to avoid eviction and demolition prior to our obtaining permits to construct a new development at this site.
There are several enclosures that you may not have been made aware of that address the health and safety and legal issues that affect the property after almost twenty-five years of lawful occupation of our small beach cottage. We purchased a tiny beach cottage in 1980 that had been built along this stretch of historic Pacific Coast Highway before the building codes were applied here and, despite its non-conformance to code, it was lawfully occupied because the County would not deprive a family of its vested home when there was no "imminent threat to health and safety."
In the 1983 El Nino ocean storm, all but the rear guesthouse portion was destroyed and we received an exemption from the Coastal Commission to "replace septic system, replace building lost to an as-if-was condition." (See enclosed March 15, 1983, Exemption From Obtaining Coastal Development Permit). We replaced our single family home with the same sized house, lower in height and set it back fifty feet from the original location thereby significantly increasing the area of sandy beach available to the public passing by, all within the criteria (area, height, and location) of the applicable "disaster replacement" criteria in the Coastal exemption.
