Leucadia Reconsiders Bluff-Saving Boulders : Clash: Petition-toting opponents persuade Encinitas council to put off allowing a barrier to help save homes on the eroding cliffs above Stone Steps Beach.

Leucadia’s beach-goers and its bluff-top dwellers clashed at a City Council meeting Wednesday over whether a popular stretch of public beach should be sacrificed to protect the homes above it.

Armed with 1,000 signatures, about 150 users of Stone Steps Beach flooded the meeting, convincing the Encinitas City Council to reconsider last week’s decision to allow a giant boulder barrier that would choke the beach but protect a dozen bluff-top homes.

“This is a beach city. It’s not a boulder city,” Kelly Hicks told the council.

The protest came one week after the council authorized City Manager Warren Shafer to issue an emergency permit to a dozen homeowners who want to build the barrier on the beach below the 300 and 400 blocks of Neptune Avenue.

But with the unanimous vote Wednesday, the council decided to hold a public hearing before allowing the barrier.

The area where the barrier would be falls within the 2-mile stretch of coastline from Moonlight Beach to Ponto Beach that some experts say contains the county’s most unstable string of bluffs.

But a group of residents calling themselves the Save Our Steps (SOS) Foundation emerged last week seeking to block the emergency permit because it could be issued without public input.

“I think they’re short-circuiting the public hearing process under the guise of an emergency,” said Dennis Stubblefield, an SOS member and nearby resident. By law “an emergency is a sudden, unexpected, drastic event. That isn’t the case here. None of these houses are about to fall off the bluff.”

But homeowners say they’re sitting ducks on the bluff tops, which are shifting like giant sand piles as the ocean erodes their foundations. And, they say, they have several geologists’ studies to prove it.

“Being intelligent homeowners, they said, ‘Do we have to wait until our bluff fails and our house is hanging over the edge?’ No, they don’t,” said Bob Trettin, a land-use consultant representing three area residents groups considering bluff improvements.

Before the council’s decision Wednesday, Shafer had planned to allow the boulder pile if, among other things, the city could order it removed at any time at the homeowners’ expense.

On Wednesday the city attorney was already drawing up a contract to present to the homeowners.

If the riprap is allowed, it will be the first time, Shafer said, that the 7-year-old city has allowed public beaches to be used to protect private property.

If the California Coastal Commission also grants the group an emergency permit, the riprapping could begin by November. Commission officials say residents must prove “imminent danger to property or life” to get the go-ahead.

Trettin says the 20-foot-wide, 10-foot-tall barrier pile would probably stay in place for only a few years, until government agencies came up with a plan to bolster the bluffs.

To SOS members, the riprap plan stinks worse than a month-old kelp pile.

Gordie Pease, who lives on nearby Lolita Street, two blocks south of Stone Steps, says the rocks would take up a large swatch of a small beach.

“It’s like pushing people out of a public park without public input,” Pease said.

One thing residents seem to agree on is that the bluffs are suffering.

Locals say it’s common for the fragile cliffs to hurl huge chunks of rock to the beach 80 feet below. Wary beach-goers have learned to steer clear, but others defiantly plant their towels below sagging overhangs even after being warned by lifeguards.

Pro-riprap homeowner Robert Frickman says he’s more worried about the bluff falling on beach-goers than his house falling off the cliff.

“Someone is going to get killed. It’s going to happen,” said Frickman, a bluff-top resident since 1974. “I’m sympathetic to the people. I don’t want to lose my beach, either.”