Hamish Patterson, 44, born in Boston, Mass., but never lived there. Grew up on West Coast in Santa Cruz Mountains. Moved to Malibu at 15. Lived off and one other places, but lived here consistently for last 12 years.
Patterson studied environmental chemistry at Northern Arizona University, and eventually left to write a sci-fi themed novel in 1994 called “WOW.”
Occupation: carpenter/artist
Please speak a little about your background.
I haven’t picked up my skill saw in about six months, which has been great. That’s my bread and butter fall back, but ever since I became a YouTube personality it’s opened a lot of interesting doors for me. And kind of enabled me to pursue my artistic endeavors, which pay the bills. I sort of have an ongoing life/video blog that I make little skateboarding / surf movies, but I also interview a lot of skaters. And it’s sort of Spicoli’s version of spirituality. And it’s kind of taken off in a real subtle way around the world, like I have a worldwide following of young kids that are watching what’s going on. So, it’s opened all these interesting doors, like these ad agencies have flown me out to London.
A couple years ago I had a really bad back injury. And I got scared. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to work as a carpenter anymore, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to work or skate. I do sharpie art, sharpie on white cardboard has become my medium. And I made my first one on YouTube, and someone offered to buy it. I was kind of shocked by that, and I made a bunch of them and just put prices on them, and that first week I think I sold 3500 bucks of art immediately and just went to Chile for a while, like I’m going surfing now. I live in a small place up at Point Dume Club where I can’t make a mess.
What experience do you have in either public service or leadership experience in business and the private sector?
My first civic engagement is being involved in getting what’s now the Sarah Wan trail, I went and got 150 signatures. That was in the late 80s. And then I moved up to Portland, Oregon to pursue my writing career, and got really involved in saving old-growth forests. And at that time it was really fractured with the earth-first people, and the loggers—my dad’s an ad agency guy. And I saw there was a disconnect between what was going on in the forests .
All day long I would just call forest service offices and talk to forest service people, and get various environmental impact reports and stuff. Begin to like you know write it out and file statements essentially to be put, I forget the exact terminology it’s a while ago, 20 years ago, but that was my first engagement with the federal government. Senator Gordon Smith was up in office then, and then you had Rod White that had just been elected and we have governor Kitshobber and Mayor Bureakatz, and as that sort of morphed I got really involved with Portland, Oregon’s drinking water supply.
And when we did that they were trying to switch from the gravity-fed to pumping uphill out of the Willamette River, and we formed a political action committee that was designed to change the city charter to say that they couldn’t switch the drinking water supply without a majority 80 percent vote of registered voters to take it from the gravity fed and pump it uphill, [it] was like a huge deal and in that process you really had to engage the system, you’re always going to city council meetings meeting council members and I got really involved with it on a whole level. Our initiative just barely- we just barely didn’t pull it off, so it was sort of a defeat, but it got my feet really wet in the process.
What was the vote?
We didn’t qualify for the ballot we missed it by like three hundred signatures or something like that. But we had to raise, I think, 27,000 signatures out of the city of Portland and it was myself, my girlfriend, a couple young people and these senior citizens [from] the Portland Democratic society just doing it, and in that thing you really had to like go and meet all these people, and that was where I gained my first kind of comfort in that zone. Because I moved away from the environmental groups, and I was working for the Toshiba corporation. And you know I played the part, you know.
I showed up, I talked to these people, because I learned working with the forest service that there were sympathetic people within the United States Forest Service that if you treated them politely and asked the right questions they would slip you the paperwork that could stop these timber cells from going through. And so I really learned that we’d catch more flies with honey then, you know.
And then at a certain point like I faded out of that, and I moved to Pennsylvania to run my girlfriend’s dude ranch, which we had talked about, and then there the East Coast operates on a different level then the West Coast.
And that was what…when was this exactly?
That was when 99-2002. So anyway I started from the bottom and ended managing the various aspects of the dude ranch. Anything from taking reservations to running the bar to making sure the food showed up for hundreds of people.
Then I moved back to Malibu. I became a carpenter at 36. And then I moved to Malibu and I discovered carpentry… Here I am with city politics and it’s the same thing. I started b/c I came in to help a bunch of kids with skateboarding, and I began to see things peripherally and gather data.
What are your two specific things you want to achieve if you get on the council, and how will you achieve them?
I guess my most important thing is youth facilities. I think there’s a dire need for youth facilities, whether it be a skate park, ballfield, I think that we need to designate an area of our city that is specifically for youth and civic activities, and brings our seniors and youths together to provide a platform for activities.
The first thing I think we need to do is create a youth facilities commission. We have a commission for everything else in the city, so why wouldn’t we have a commission specifically designated for providing youth with facilities. And they would go engage commercial property owners, private property owners, and various entities in our community to get some acreage for these kids to have their facilities.
[The second is] the PCH. I think every civic problem in our community may stem from the PCH. We have one ribbon of blacktop that comes through –
We’re not addressing it, that’s the problem. We’re being told that everything’s out of our hands. We have a city government that
I think we need to prioritize traffic safety zones. There’s five major zones that I see – Trancas, Heathercliff, Paradise Cove, the fish market at Corral, and Cross Creek. Specifically designate a task force zone, where we get all the stake holders in there, get all the agencies involved, and we apply the weight of the city of Malibu, all our contacts in the city government, and we handle it immediately. We don’t wait for it and say it’s out of our hands and do some studies. Like, we get in there and call some special city council meetings– whatever it takes to get these issues handled. We’re not using our cache as a community.
What is a weakness of the current city council?
Polarization of the community. I think that the city council pits one group of people against the other. For example, the youth are in the middle of every major land development in Malibu. You saw it in the last city council meeting in Crummer versus rancho Malibu. Who’s stuck in the middle of this dispute? Kids with ballfields. So if you’re for one project or against the project, you either like kids and ballfields or you don’t like kids and ballfields. And that splits our community apart. So anyone who comes to the city council who doesn’t fit their agenda is marginalized. So that you’ve polarized a group of people who are actually part of the solution.
So when I see a city council polarizing the community, I see that that is not what it’s supposed to be.
The first thing that I would do is look people in the eye. That would make city hall friendlier. I would lower the dais, first of all, that would put us on an even playing field with those testifying.
And I’m a big open government guy. I think that we need to have community expediters. Just the way expediters work for the planning commission, we need to have community expediters that help people.
Like liaisons?
Exactly. I think we have enough people in the community that want to be involved but they’re given a cold shoulder at City Hall. I’ve had to fight my way into City Hall… We need to all feel free to come down to city hall and be welcomed whether you’re for me or against me.
What is one of your weaknesses?
My biggest weakness is how people perceive me. People want to marginalize me as some surfer obstructionist. Which I think is the fault of our whole society, people want to judge the package instead of the content. For me that’s the hardest thing for people to get around— is there a brain inside that guy? Can we sit down and discuss this or do I just get to be Spicoli? And I’ve heard it before, and I’m cool with it. I don’t take myself that seriously. But I’m dead serious about what this [election] is about. Like this is no joke for me. I’m 100 percent serious about tackling what’s going on down there. I think my other biggest weakness is people consider me an “anti-” guy. I’m a “pro” guy. I’m just pro- using the tools of our community.
You mentioned at a debate last week that you believed Malibu’s aging infrastructure would be a problem in the future. Can you expand on what you meant?
Okay I’m just going to go water. We live in Water District 29. Water district 29 is an aging, archaic infrastructure that hasn’t been updated in a long time. At the current estimated price it’s a quarter of a billion dollars to update Water District 29 (in Malibu). So when I hear about civic center development, and the potential for them to have to treat 600,000 of water on any given day, I keep asking, “where are you getting the water from, how are you getting 600,000 gallons of water to Malibu in an aging infrastructure that needs a quarter billion dollar retrofit?” and no one seems to be able to tell me anything about that, and it alarms me… why are we adding more pieces to the puzzle when we can’t address the pieces we’ve got right now? That chunk of development is a huge piece of the Malibu puzzle.
We have two big bottlenecks right now, Water District 29, and the PCH. Neither of them are being addressed in the civic center plan. They’re all talking about everything after. And I keep saying let’s get to the front and answer that, and then maybe it will make sense to me.
Why should people vote for Hamish Patterson?
I represent the public. I am an outsider to the political machine, I come with fresh ideas, fresh perspectives. I don’t believe the Sacramento way is the way to handle local problems. I think that Malibu is the center of some sort of unique space on our planet, and I thin it’s time to use that cache to solve our problems, and I don’t see it happening.