Laguna Beach has committed up to $242,300 in public funds to temporarily shore up a stretch of hillside along Skyline Drive that gave way earlier this year, with crews moving in this month to get ahead of the next round of winter storms. The work is meant to hold the slope together, not fix it for good — that job still falls to the property owners whose land sits above the failure.
A February Storm Triggers the Slide
The trouble traces back to a significant rain event on Feb. 21 that caused the ground to give way behind 1525 and 1535 Skyline Drive, as well as near 1587 Atlantic Way, according to the Los Angeles Times. When community development staff examined the site, they found a damaged drainage flume along with erosion and slope failure at the back of the affected properties, the paper reported.
Deputy Director of Community Development Gabriel Linares sent the property owners a letter on March 12 spelling out the need for corrective action. The report notes that the owners did not submit plans for temporary work or permanent remediation, which led the city to open code enforcement proceedings in July, including a nuisance abatement notice and order. Property owners have since agreed to let the city onto the site to carry out the winterization effort.
What the Temporary Fix Actually Involves
Winterization work began Monday, Nov. 9, and is intended to stabilize the landslide area only until a permanent solution can be engineered. The scope includes debris removal and grading to prevent localized ponding, plus construction of an earthen swale designed to direct stormwater toward a natural drainage course and mitigate concentrated flows coming from a compromised concrete ditch. Plastic sheeting and sandbags are also being placed around the slide area to limit water infiltration, per the same account.
City staff maintain that permanent slope remediation remains the responsibility of the property owners, and Laguna Beach has said it will pursue cost recovery for the winterization work once it wraps up. The city council itself approved the city manager's execution of an agreement for the $242,300 expenditure and authorized the manager to carry out the Skyline Drive work.
How the City Justified Skipping a Bidding Process
The spending moved forward without a formal bidding process, something city official Jane Abzug said is allowed under the public contracts code. Abzug said a four-fifths vote of the city council can authorize emergency spending without competitive bidding when it's necessary to safeguard life, health or property — a threshold the council's own resolution reflects by permitting the city manager or a designee to approve such spending as long as a contract stays under $500,000 and the disaster relief fund has enough money to cover it. Any contract approved this way still has to be reported back to the council at its next regular meeting.
Abzug also said staff had weighed the possibility of additional disasters or emergency work tied to an expected El Niño weather pattern when considering the city's posture heading into the season. Laguna Beach, nestled along the Orange County coast in California, has faced other slope failures.
A City With a History of Hillside Trouble
Skyline Drive is not the city's first brush with a slope giving way. Back in 1993, officials grappled with a landslide on Mystic Lane, where a proposed $600,000 stabilization project was going to be sharply limited unless all five affected property owners signed liability waivers, according to the Los Angeles Times' archive coverage of that episode. Even so, the city manager at the time said Laguna Beach would do enough slope repair to prevent another crisis regardless of whether homeowners waived their rights.
More recently, a slope failure next to Sunset Avenue between 10th and 11th Avenue tore away part of the roadway and the utilities beneath it on March 5, 2023, according to ASCE Orange County. South Coast Water District and GMU Engineers and Geologists teamed up on the emergency response and repair for that failure, the engineering group noted.
Under the city's own municipal code, land conditions like these can qualify as a public nuisance. Chapter 7.24 covers land whose topography, geology or configuration causes erosion, subsidence or surface-water runoff problems serious enough to injure or threaten public health, safety and welfare or neighboring properties, according to Laguna Beach's municipal code. The same chapter also covers unlawful conditions that endanger others' health or safety or that make a public park, beach, street or highway dangerous to pass through.
