The Rob Reiner-led petition drive to place a voter-approved formula retail ordinance for Malibu on the Nov. 4 ballot is nearing the required number of signatures, a representative for the group said last week.
In order to bring the “Your Malibu, Your Decision” Initiative to Malibu voters, at least 1,300 registered Malibu voters must sign petitions by May 6, said Felix Schein, spokesman for the Save Malibu group. Petitions were sent to Malibu voters on April 19 and have also been distributed at the major shopping centers since then.
Schein said the group had nearly gotten the required number of signatures as of Friday last week.
“I don’t have numbers through the weekend, but heading into the weekend we were quite a ways there,” Schein said Monday. “We were almost there.”
The initiative would subject all major shopping center development and commercial or mixed use construction over 20,000 square feet to a citywide vote. It would also place a 30 percent limit on the number of chain stores permitted to operate in Malibu shopping centers. “Essential” services such as groceries, banks and medical offices are excluded, among others.
Chain stores would be required to obtain conditional use permits from the city planning department and prepare a specific plan for parking and environmental impacts, among other considerations, under the initiative.
In existing shopping centers, the 30 percent limit would apply to spaces under 1,400 square feet. Schein said most local merchants do not need larger spaces.
“Our concern was that if you were restricting chain access to [larger] retail spaces, they’d essentially just be vacant,” Schein said. “There weren’t enough local merchants seeking spaces of that size.”
In a 3-2 vote last week, the Malibu Planning Commission passed a different formula retail ordinance for the City Council’s consideration. The commission’s version removed several requirements, including a cap on square footage for chain stores, saying tighter restrictions could expose the city to lawsuits.
Legality of ordinance?
Critics of a formula retail ordinance have questioned whether a city dictating which stores a landlord can rent to could be interpreted by a judge as a “taking” of private land, violating the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.
City Attorney Christi Hogin said she did not wish to comment on the specific merits of the initiative until it gained the signatures to be placed on the ballot. But she said the law in California is not settled.
“There are legal questions that the California court has not answered yet. So nobody on either side should be telling you that it’s clear as a bell, because it’s not,” Hogin said. “As I see it, you’re balancing the right of private property owners to make a return on their investment against the right of the community to regulate for the common good. And there’s a balance to that.”
Schein said the initiative put forward by Save Malibu had been carefully prepared and did not constitute a taking.
“The ordinance is based on ordinances that have passed in other communities, and to the best of our knowledge there hasn’t been a finding of a taking in any of those communities,” Schein said.
He said the ordinance is not a “ban on development of any kind” but would simply “empower” residents to have a say in what their city looked like.
“Nothing precludes [a] developer from working with the city to develop a plan that the voters would ultimately approve,” Schein said. “There’s an automatic assumption that the residents would vote down any reasonable proposal put in front of them. I think that’s a stretch. “
Requests for comment to several Civic Center landholders and developments were not returned.
Schein added that one misconception about the ordinance is that it would affect all commercial development, but he said this would only affect “dozens” of project, not “hundreds,” because it only pertains to new developments of 20,000 feet or greater.
One stated goal of the ordinance is to give local, community-serving businesses a chance to rent stores at a fair price. But some have raised concerns that if development is limited by the ordinance, a dearth of supply could actually cause rent prices to rise and make it more difficult for local stores to rent.
Schein dismissed that critique as well.
“I guess I would challenge the other side of that supply curve question. It presumes there’s unlimited demand, and there isn’t,” Schein said. “At the current price, they’re already pricing out local merchants.”
Schein predicted that prices would rise, however, for chain stores, while falling for local merchants.