Inside the $20 Million Battle Over Malibu's Broad Beach

With players like Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman and Pierce Brosnan seeing their oceanfront slipping into the Pacific, the costly plan to refill Broad Beach launches a wave of controversy.

Modern Family co-creator Steven Levitan moved his own family to Broad Beach a decade ago, lured by its pristine water, killer views and -- perhaps most of all -- by its wide swaths of sand, perfect for jogging and touch football. But these days, Malibu's most secluded stretch of oceanfront real estate isn't exactly living up to its name.

"You can't walk down the beach, except when the tide is very low," Levitan says. Erosion has caused Broad's sand -- including its beloved Martha's Vineyard-esque dunes -- to wash almost entirely away, its namesake width diminishing to a narrow nub. This has threatened houses and required the installation of an unsightly emergency rock seawall. Levitan now finds himself at the center of one of the biggest turf wars in Malibu history, as Broad Beach has become the flashpoint of a cresting controversy over sand, surf and septic tanks. It's pitting the shore's wealthy, well-connected homeowners -- among them Steven Spielberg, Michael Ovitz, Dustin Hoffman and Ray Romano -- against a band of environmentalists, public access advocates, scientists and government officials.

The source of the conflict: the residents' ambitious $20 million proposal to dramatically reshape the area by dredging in 600,000 cubic yards of sand from one of several targeted "borrow sites" at the bottom of the ocean. (They have ranged from Ventura Harbor in the north down to Dockweiler Beach and Manhattan Beach in L.A. County.) Homeowners have hired engineers...

But opponents believe the residents' plan is merely a shortsighted scheme that will primarily benefit property owners, if it works at all, and may well incur disastrous side effects for the coastline. "What they are proposing is just going to exacerbate the problem," says Mark Abramson, senior watershed adviser at the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Foundation. There is a widespread belief that the homeowners' proposal is not a magnanimous gesture offered to a cash-crunched state. Rather, they see it as a self-serving one designed to enhance the beachfront of a wealthy few (the beach has 114 homes in all with an average price of $7.8 million). Many also argue that the houses themselves have contributed to the erosion by suffocating the natural flow of sediment due to the structures' shoulder-to-shoulder development over the decades -- a theory that the property owners dispute. For her part, California Coastal Commission engineer Lesley Ewing believes a number of factors are at work, including the past damming of nearby Trancas Creek as well as larger changes in general wave pattern behavior against Broad's shore.

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