Environment Los Angeles County

A grass-roots movement to topple the Long Beach Breakwater took a step forward Thursday when the environmentally active Surfrider Foundation formed a task force to consider turning the 2 1/2-mile barrier into an artificial reef. Such a move would restore surf and enhance tourism along the city's coastline, while protecting the fish that have made a habitat of the 47-year-old breakwater, said Gordon LaBedz, chairman of the foundation's task force on water pollution.

A small group of protesters wearing gags gathered Friday in Westchester to picket a leadership forum on the DreamWorks development proposal for the environmentally controversial area just north of Playa del Rey.

The Los Angeles City Council moved this week to protect picturesque rock formations in the Stoney Point area of Chatsworth from development. In 1991, the City Council approved a blueprint for development in Chatsworth that called for the rocks to be preserved when making planning decisions.

If the luxury homes recently proposed for Deervale Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains are ever built, they will have a commanding view of the San Fernando Valley. But a dim view is being taken of the plan by neighbors, who say the 80-acre project will ruin a scenic ridge that should be preserved as parkland. The developer, Shawbeth Inc. of Glendale, wants to build a gated 24-home community that would be the largest hillside development in Sherman Oaks in six years.

Palos Verdes Peninsula residents and the San Gabrielino/Tongva Tribal Council argued Friday that a planned nature center would be too large and a blot in what is already a beautiful nature park. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Joseph R.

The Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy has hired a new executive director to oversee the day-to-day management of the nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving undeveloped land on the peninsula. Kathleen McGowan of Rolling Hills Estates, who has worked primarily as an engineering consultant for private industry, started the part-time position two weeks ago.

An Agoura Hills-based developer paid $71,800 in retroactive fees Wednesday for cutting down two 300-year-old oak trees in violation of a Los Angeles County ordinance, then angered environmentalists by asking permission to cut down two more. At a hearing in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission, the commission ordered executives of the Dale Poe Development Corp. to pay "mitigation fees" for cutting down the two trees in October 1995.

Malibu's City Council approved a proposal Tuesday to designate the city's 27-mile coastline a marine refuge, making it the largest coastal sanctuary in the state and one that would go far beyond the recommendations of a commissioned UCLA study to set aside 4 1/2 square miles of shore.

The gnatcatcher--that winged killjoy to Southern California developers and endangered hero to area preservationists--may have stuck its beak into another controversy, this time at a secluded cemetery construction site near Whittier. Plans to erect a Buddhist columbarium on unincorporated Los Angeles County land have attracted the attention of investigators for the U.S.

A tiny skirmish in the war to clean up Santa Monica Bay was joined about a year ago when a boat mechanic in Marina del Rey slipped on some slimy runoff and found that it was from a restaurant spraying down soiled kitchen floor mats outside its back door. The aggravated mechanic protested to a local environmental activist, who, in turn, cajoled El Torito Mexican restaurant into hosing its food waste not into a storm drain, but into a new drain that would lead to a sewage treatment plant.