Around the Town
We’ve got a new City Council with a couple of old familiar faces, John Sibert re-elected and Joan House, former mayor and councilmember, back for another term. Brand-new face Skylar Peak is 27 years old and raring to go. Peak in his first run for political office turned out to be the top vote-getter, which means that he ran an effective campaign and also put together a coalition of both parties in Malibu.
There really are two parties in Malibu. The old Sensible Party, which is really the old Jennings-Barovsky-Stern-Sibert-House-Rosenthal and La Monte group; and the Change Party, including the Jefferson Wagner-John Mazza-Ozzie Silna-Malibu Township Council crowd—and now the Preserve Malibu coalition. Of the two that just left the council, Pamela Conley Ulich started in the Sensible Coalition and then moved over to be more of a bit of each, and Jefferson Wagner came in as a Change Party member and proved to be somewhat of a centrist also. I use all the terms loosely since on any particular issue council members shift around and in time we’ll know how the new council will shake out. Every council has its own chemistry and it’s not always easy to predict how it will end up voting.
There clearly are shifts coming. Malibu is changing and many are uncomfortable with the way it’s going. Whether that discomfort is enough to create a political movement will become clear in the next couple of city elections.
It’s also pretty clear that the Malibu voting population doesn’t seem to care very much about who occupies City Hall. Turnouts in Municipal elections keep dropping. This time we hit pretty much a new low when only 27.6% of all the registered voters took the time to vote, even though voting has become easier. You can now sign up for a permanent absentee ballot and vote absentee in every election, as many people do. In fact, in this election 55.6% of the Malibu voters decided to vote absentee and that number seems to grow with every election.
In other news, the movement for a separate school district is still quite alive due in part to some of the Board of Education beginning to think they just might be better off without us. The issue is very complicated and primarily financial. Assuming that we have the population and dollars to support our own separate Malibu School District there is then the very hairy problem of sitting down with the old school district and trying to work out a split of both the assets, like buildings, the liabilities, like old voter-approved bonds, and about one thousand other things. It’s basically a divorce process with all of the same emotional issues involving money and love, long since lost. We won’t know for a while what will happen and if it’s doable.
There are a bunch of city scoping meetings coming up about a number of development projects in the pipeline. The scoping meeting is not to approve the project, which comes much later. It’s purely to find out what questions people want answered in the Environmental Impact Report (EIR). Knowles Adkisson did a story about the process this week that’s well worth reading to help give you an overview. The major projects include:
-The Malibu Hotel, known as the Ranch Malibu Resort. This project has been in the pipeline for as long as I can remember, probably 20-plus years, and involves 146 rooms broken up into little casitas.
-Development of five estate home parcels up near Bluffs Parks, which involves a gift of private lands for a ball field and additional parking.
-Development of a parcel primarily for a Whole Foods Market, in the area where the Papa Jacks Skate Park was located.
-Story poles are already up so you can go over and get a sense of the size of the projects.
A showdown is coming over California State Parks’ Malibu Lagoon project, which is due to begin on June 1, 2012 unless a court can be persuaded to step in and stop or delay the project. Look for bulldozers and protestors. Several people have asked me about it and frankly also where it’s located. If you want to go see for yourself, walk down Civic Center Way to the beach. First you will pass Starbucks on your left and then Prudential Malibu Realty on your right. Cross over PCH, pass through the parking lot and take the path to the ocean, where Malibu Creek runs into the ocean. But before you do, look to your right, on the ocean side of PCH, and you’ll see the area in contention. Some call it a working wetland, some call it a swamp, some call it a failed wetland, some call it nothing but a bug breeding ground. I must confess that I’m undecided. In all the years it existed in Malibu I occasionally walked by it and never gave it a moment’s thought, as I suspect did most of you.
The clock is ticking and we’ll soon find out.