A Malibu beach and a gun-toting legislator: It’s good to be home

On vacation, I generally try to ditch the Blackberry and tune out breaking news.

But of course I always fail.

How am I supposed to read about a state legislator from San Bernardino trying to board a plane to Sacramento with a loaded Colt .45 and not wish I was back at work?

How can I enjoy my vacation when I open the paper and read about a fabulous Malibu beach that was donated to the public in 1979 and transferred to county control in 1995 that’s still not accessible to beachgoers? Unless, of course, they are willing to rappel down the side of the cliff, hike in from another beach or scale a chain-link fence.

On Monday, my first day back, I tried to get hold of Assemblyman Tim Donnelly (R-San Bernardino) to congratulate him. Often legislators say one thing but do another. Donnelly, on the other hand, is a man of principle. He has long been an ardent gun rights advocate, so what better way to prove he means business than to take a loaded weapon to Ontario International Airport last Wednesday?

Donnelly, a tea party darling and former member of the Minutemen, claimed it was a mistake. He carries a gun, he explained, because of threats from those who disagree with his views on illegal immigration, and he forgot it was in his briefcase.

Work with him on this, folks. Haven’t you ever gotten to the airport and discovered you were accidentally packing heat? Whoops, I knew there was something heavy in my backpack, but I thought that was a tuna salad sandwich from Subway.

Maybe Donnelly was just taking his work with the Minutemen to its logical conclusion. If private citizens can patrol the nation’s borders, why shouldn’t they also serve as voluntary air marshals? Then again, it’s possible he assumed everyone else on his flight would be an illegal immigrant, and he intended to hijack the plane to Mexico to hand them over to authorities. Or maybe he was trying to make a point.

Last year, Donnelly blasted a proposal to ban the open carrying of guns in public. He called the bill, which became law Jan. 1, “a form of tyranny.” And when the freshman legislator first got to Sacramento in 2010, he mounted antique rifles on the wall of his office.

Unfortunately for Donnelly, officials in San Bernardino and Sacramento said there was no record of his having a concealed weapon permit. And he was rather evasive when reporters asked for clarification, saying “it’s certainly not something that I feel that I need to address.”

No surprise, then, that he and his staff didn’t return my calls Monday or Tuesday, and I’m guessing he won’t answer the 10 questions I sent to his flack, including:

• Why was he not arrested?

• Would you or I have been?

I mean, why even have TSA screeners if a guy who rides border posse, has rifles on his office wall, rants about tyranny and goes through airport security with a loaded weapon is merely going to be briefly detained by police and issued a citation before being allowed to board the next flight? They did, at least, confiscate the gun.

If Donnelly gets back to me, I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, let me get back to the beach, which also has a Wild West angle. Way back in 1979, as my colleague Tony Barboza reported on Sunday, “Bonanza” stars Lorne Greene and Michael Landon donated beach property to the public in the name of Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on the show. The deal was that it had to be used as a “public park for recreation purposes.” It ended up under L.A. County control in 1997, and the state Coastal Conservancy coughed up a $700,000 grant in 2004 to help get Dan Blocker County Beach up and running.

And all these years later, with the county having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars more on planning, the one-mile stretch of one of California’s greatest treasures is still so tricky and dangerous to get to it’s effectively off limits to most county residents.

“The project is moving forward,” a county spokesperson told Barboza, with a proposal set to reach supervisors by midyear.

Of which decade?

The Malibu coastline is a prime example of how, over the decades, California’s public officials, real estate developers and homeowners have, through a combination of greed, incompetence and laziness, allowed coastal views to be obscured and public access blocked.

It doesn’t seem to take as long for parks and other facilities to open when they’re named after sitting supervisors. Care to go hiking at Michael D. Antonovich Regional Park, anyone? Maybe we could leave the kids at Gloria Molina-Para Los Niños Child Development Center. I’m betting if Dan Blocker Beach was going to be named Zev Yaroslavsky Beach, it would have been opened 15 years ago and Yaroslavsky would have been the first one in the water.

Malibu Councilman Jefferson Wagner, who’s tired of waiting and wants the county to let the city of Malibu open and operate the beach, told me he’s going to take members of the Coastal Commission there Thursday and make his case.

I don’t care who’s in charge. Dan Blocker died almost 40 years ago. Can we just give Hoss his beach, already, and let the public in?

steve.lopez@latimes.com

(“Dreams & Schemes,” Steve Lopez’s 10-year collection of Times columns, is available at http://161.35.110.226/store)