Environmental lawyer comments on Malibu Inn

Your article “Inn and spa developer scores early victory” (The Acorn, Sept. 29) accepts at face value the claim that Mr. Brian Boudreau, the developer of the Malibu Valley Inn and Spa, won his lawsuit against Calabasas resident Mary Hubbard who wrote the ballot argument against Measure C.

Mr. Boudreau did not win his lawsuit. He lost it. He got almost nothing he asked for.

Measure C asks Calabasas voters in the Nov. 8 election whether their city council should approve the annexation of 152 acres in the heart of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area to accommodate Mr. Boudreau’s commercial project. In her ballot argument, Mary Hubbard gives the voters seven principal reasons to vote no. Mr. Boudreau did not want Calabasas voters to see any of these reasons. Thus he sued Mary, asking the court to strike the entire opposition argument. Specifically, he claimed 13 statements made by Mary were “false and misleading.”

The courts removed none of Mary’s seven reasons. Moreover, it left totally intact 11 of the 13 statements challenged by Mr. Boudreau. For example, the court rebuffed his request to find false or misleading the statement that “[o]ver 3,000 additional weekend car trips and almost 2,000 weekday car trips per day on Las Virgenes/Malibu Canyon Road would create even worse traffic backups and smog. . .” And it rejected his request to hide from the voters the disclosure that his new development is not an equestrian resort and that 91 percent of the commercial project area is devoted to hotel rooms, a huge convention center, restaurants with liquor licenses, offices and retail use.

The courts also ordered removal of the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation from the list of project opponents that appears at the end of the opposition argument. But that change hardly means the federation supports the project, much less that Mary misled the voters about the federation’s true position. The federation has repeatedly expressed its strong opposition to Mr. Boudreau’s project, among other things, because it severely violates the Santa Monica Mountains North Area Plan’s density requirements.

In the end, Mr. Boudreau’s lawsuit was nothing but a desperate attempt to suppress information about his controversial project’s adverse impacts on traffic and the environment, and to intimidate into silence those thinking of contributing to the debate over the project with information or arguments he doesn’t like. Frank P. Angel Santa Monica