Over the last couple of years, the ever exfoliating melodrama of the purchase and management of the Chili Cook-Off Site just seems to peel away to newer, seamier layers. If it were an onion, any responsible cook would have returned it to the vendor and asked for his money back.
Unfortunately the very people who stuck Malibu with the deal are now making chili with whatever dead produce they have at hand. The size and quality of the site are not sufficient for the waste water reclamation the proponents had claimed was their principal intention for its purchase. They had been warned that this was so. Next they gave this humble piece of seasonal bog a fancy name, Legacy Park, and set up some thermometers, paying hired help to paint pretty pictures to convince the gullible that something was happening. They had community meetings.
The vastly over-priced purchase of this land is a horse-collar that Malibu will have to wear. The people who put it there should never have been rewarded as they have. The developer of the new rental space has determined that only shops with profit margins of a thousand percent or more will be able to afford his rents. Do I smell some sewer leakage?
Meanwhile, A&B down the road tries to do what it can to make Malibu work. If the price for the land in question had been closer to its real use value, A&B could have been let a deal for four or five thousand square feet at the old Malibu Lumber yard, leaving plenty of room for other vendors. The city could then have taken over the old A&B site and found a developer to upgrade and coordinate the area around Las Flores and integrate it with the historic old Courthouse, fixing that cursed curve that causes so many accidents.
It will be a Legacy Park. Malibu will be stuck with its short-falls and loan payments for years; particularly should the developer ever do a head-count and find out that just a thousand or two Malibuites can afford what he and his ilk are peddling. Those people don’t live here year around, but their houses are always in a constant state of being remodeled. The hardware business will look so much better then.
V. Gerald Scordan