From the Editor / Arnold G. York
For Malibu City Council, we endorse:
Sharon Barovsky, incumbent
Andy Stern, incumbent
On the term-limits Initiative, Measure U, we advocate a No vote.
In the past 15 years that Malibu has been a city, this current City Council, under the leadership of Sharon Barovsky and Andy Stern, has accomplished more than most, if not all, of the previous councils.
For as long as I can remember, there have been a handful of major items on every prior council’s agenda. At the top of the list was the goal of keeping the Civic Center from building out into a large urban shopping center. Development was the dirty word, and people shouted and screamed about a million square feet of new buildings and resulting traffic, and the loss of our community feeling.
Many councils have talked about it, but this council actually pulled it off-they bought the 20 acres smack dab in the heart of our town at an absolutely discounted price of $25 million, and now we’re going to turn it into a central park. You might think the people who were against development would be overjoyed. Well, you’d be wrong. All I’ve heard is carping. You paid too much. We don’t like the deal. Jerry Perenchio is rich. He just should have given it to us. We should have bought it all with grant money.
Well, let me tell you, pulling off this purchase was a major accomplishment. I for one doubted if they could do it. There are so many stakeholders involved in the Civic Center that any one of them could have blown the deal out of the water. It’s not just dealing with the state; it’s dealing with all the various agencies of the state, many of which don’t get along with each other very well. There is the state of California, and that means the local legislators, the California Coastal Commission, the State Water Resources Control Board, the California Department of Parks and Recreation, and a myriad of others. Then there are the Feds who’ve got to have their say, because Malibu Creek is a blue line waterway of the United States. There’s also the county of Los Angeles and its myriad agencies, and all the animal protection people, the conservation easement crowd, the endangered species crowd, the Native Americans, the watershed groups and the Preserving the Natural Flora and Fauna crowd. Then there are the NGOs (nongovernmental organizations to the uninitiated) like Heal the Bay and the Sierra Club and the Santa Monica Bay Keeper who pitch their two cents in. And there are the surfers and the fishing crowd (both recreational and commercial), and then you get into the private landowners. And then, of course, there is the not-so-loyal opposition who attend every council meeting and every other public forum to protest that whatever you do is wrong, wrong, wrong. Believe me, for $300 per month, being on the City Council is not a great job. But Sharon and Andy persevered, hung in there, and escrow just closed on the Chili Cook-Off acreage for which we owe them, and the rest of the council and many of the prior councils, a vote of thanks. That alone would be enough to justify reelection for both Sharon and Andy because it’s historic. It’s sort of like the people who had the vision for New York’s Central Park.
But that’s not all. During their watch, the city has been working a deal, which is close to done, to buy the ball fields up on Bluffs Park. That land was owned by the state Department of Parks and Recreation and it’s been trying to get that land back for as long as I can remember. The original deal for the ball fields was made by the then Gov. Jerry Brown and his young chief of staff, a kid named Gray Davis. That’s how long they’ve been trying. Well, this council pulled it off. We are going to be able to buy those ball fields from the state for less than it would have cost to rebuild those fields somewhere else, despite the opposition of some of our environmental locals who did everything in their power to try and scuttle the deal, not, I suspect, because they were against it, but because they were fearful that Sharon and Andy would get credit for it. Sharon Barovsky and Andy Stern should get credit for it. None of these deals was a foregone conclusion. All faced opposition, some genuine and some just plain nasty. Just look at some of the letters to the editor this week and you get a sense of the vitriol that has been heaved at them.
Both Sharon and Andy deserve the credit; they put in many sleepless nights worrying about this, and they’ve provided the leadership to help make this happen.
They deserve the credit and they deserve to be reelected. I strongly urge you to reelect both of them.
P.S. I wouldn’t touch the term limits law. Two full four-year terms should be enough for anyone.