The Malibu City Council has approved a plan to regulate land use on 110 acres in Malibu, and the people of Malibu have the privilege to vote on it November 4. This has resulted in an eruption of hysteria from a small group called CAN. Voters are trying to understand why the council’s efforts to block a shopping center from being built on the Chili Cook-Off site and replace it with a nearly 19-acre Central Park, gain a free community center for the city and win over 40 acres of open space and public trails have been greeted with predictions of calamity from this group.
CAN’s opposition is the result of the fundamental world view of many of its members that the Coastal Commission should decide our land use instead of the people who live here. Who is the Malibu CAN? The president of CAN and their spokesperson are the same individuals, who, as the Malibu Coastal Land Conservancy, successfully lobbied that Coastal Commission to take over Malibu city government and impose 500 pages of forbidding and inexorably expensive LCP regulations on our private residences. These are the same people who gave power point presentations at Coastal Commission LCP hearings accusing Malibu residents of being bad environmentalists and wanting to keep the public out of Malibu beaches. MCLC members supported the Commission’s unprecedented lawsuit to stop Malibuites from exercising their fundamental right to vote in a referendum and decide local land use and zoning for ourselves.
Measure M limits future commercial growth in Malibu, and the CAN group cannot be trusted to do that. CAN leaders were silent in the face of the Coastal Commission’s scheme to turn Malibu into a hotel megalopolis while dozens of us pleaded before the Commission to reverse their up-zoning of the Civil Center to “visitor serving” commercial.
Keeping the Chili Cook-Off site vacant forever is the best way to reduce traffic and commercial development in Malibu. It is important that we not let the Coastal Commission and its political operatives cause us to lose this opportunity of a lifetime.
Anne Hoffman