“Escondido Beach means ‘Hidden Beach’ in Spanish, and the lack of public access here kept it hidden from many people that could not find a nearby public trail to the beach, or even a public parking spot, over the decades,” commission staff wrote in a report ahead of Wednesday’s decision. The properties are currently owned by Frank Mancuso, former chief executive of Paramount Pictures and MGM, and the family of Don Wildman, founder of Bally Total Fitness. Wildman died in 2018, leaving the property to his heirs.īut the violations stretch back to the early 1980s, when prior owners Ken and Jeannette Chiate and Marilyn and Roger Wolk wrongly recorded the location of the easement along a steep grade instead of a gently sloped arroyo, according to the report. In the years and decades that followed, lot line adjustments, metal fencing, thick vegetation, paved driveways and other encroachments installed by Chiate and later Wildman further obscured the pathway and parking spaces along Pacific Coast Highway, the report said. “Even if the public knew that the vertical public access easement was here, they could not physically use that easement,” enforcement analyst Robert Moddelmog told the commission. Wildman purchased his property in the mid-1980s, and Mancuso in 1991.īoth argued through the 1990s and 2000s that the public accessway should be moved elsewhere, due to the difficulties of building on and improving the recorded easement area, the report said. In California, the coastline is considered public land up to the high-tide line. “Whenever we see access blocked to this resource that is public, and guaranteed to be public by our laws in California, we want to do our best to protect them,” said Laura Walsh, California policy manager for the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation, which supported the decision. “We feel, really, a sense of injustice when a legal, public resource that’s ours is violated, and that’s what happened here in a very convoluted way,” she said.
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