Malibu Lost Its Trail Ownership Suit. It Shouldn't Appeal.

A judge rejected the city's claim to trails on Winding Way and Murphy Way on two separate grounds.

Malibu's attempt to take ownership of the public trails inside its city limits failed on two separate grounds this week. A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge found that the state law the city built its case on doesn't support the claim, and that the claim was filed too late, the Santa Monica Daily Press reported. The city says it's weighing an appeal.

By the city's own account, hikers are still leaving cars on the shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway to reach the Winding Way trailhead, because there isn't parking. Malibu says it put that warning in writing to the trail agency as early as July 2024. It filed the suit on April 14. Nothing about the last year has moved a single hiker off that shoulder.

Owning a trail and fixing one are different jobs.

That's the mismatch at the center of this case. The complaint ran 257 pages and catalogued operational failures — no parking, sunset closures the city said went unenforced, vegetation the city said went unmanaged. The relief it asked for was a deed. Quiet title and declaratory relief are court orders about who holds a property interest; they don't stripe a lot or send out a crew with a mower.

Malibu's own statement after the ruling concedes the point. "Those are the conditions that led the City Council to act, and the Court's ruling does not change them," the city said. True. A win wouldn't have changed them either.

The city already knows how to sue for the thing it actually wants. In February it filed a separate case seeking damages over the Palisades Fire, alleging the authority failed to clear brush on its parkland, including vacant lots along Pacific Coast Highway and Big Rock Drive. That case names a specific failure and asks for money. It's also the cheaper comparison: an agreement on parking, closure enforcement and brush contracts needs no judge at all, and the city says the authority has already begun new vegetation contracts for 2026, which Malibu dismissed as too late.

Here's the strongest thing the other side would say, at full strength. Mayor Bruce Silverstein said the council didn't reach for court first: "When those efforts proved unsuccessful, the City Council concluded that legal action was the only option to effect change."

And the underlying record isn't nothing. The Broad Fire started in November 2024 on authority-managed open space at Malibu Bluffs and burned about 50 acres. Weeks later the Franklin Fire burned more than 4,000 acres and destroyed 20 homes. State records showed fewer than 200 acres of fuel reduction in the year before those fires, across roughly 75,000 acres of the authority's holdings. That gap is the part of this file that made me stop and read it twice. On February 8, 2026, Joshua Farmer was struck and killed on Pacific Coast Highway near Winding Way, close to the trails at issue.

But an acreage gap is an argument for enforcement, for a maintenance agreement, or for the damages case already on file. It isn't an argument for transferring title, which is what a judge just rejected — on statutory grounds and on timeliness. An appeal has to beat both. Malibu bet that its 1991 incorporation quietly voided a 1998 quitclaim deed and handed it a trail network in one motion. That was a big swing at a list of small, fixable problems, and it missed.

Malibu says it's still willing to work with the agencies on safety, parking, closures and brush. The instruction to the city's lawyers comes from the City Council, in the coming weeks. That's the meeting to watch: Malibu is deciding whether to spend more of its budget appealing a ruling that says those trails aren't the city's to take.

Source: smdp.com, retrieved September 5, 2026.