The City is in the process of improving the Las Flores Canyon Park, installing a restroom and a small bridge that goes over the creek from Las Flores Canyon Road to Rambla Pacifco, which adds additional parking on the Rambla Pacifico side. If you’ve never been there, it is a lovely little park, which includes a children’s play area with equipment and a very restful atmosphere. I assume the bridge is for pedestrians and for the occasional mountain lion that might have business on Las Flores.
Building overpasses for mountain lions seems to be all the rage these days and the State has just allocated $1 million plus to study the feasibility of building a mountain lion overpass over Highway 101 (the Ventura freeway) to achieve some degree of biological diversity in the species. It’s not quite clear to me if they want to encourage the Malibu mountain lions to start dating Valley girls, or perhaps they want the Valley mountain lion studs to go across in search of those Malibu hottie mountain lion chicks. Either way, it would certainly increase biological diversity. The problem I see is how do you get the mountain lions to use the pedestrian bridge over the freeway? You just can’t put up a sign that says “Malibu” with an arrow. In fact, we don’t even know if these are English-speaking mountain lions. Perhaps they could put up a picture of a particularly fetching young female mountain lion so that even the dumbest of the guys could figure out that the action is in Malibu. The ultimate price tag I heard bandied about was $10-$15 million, which seems a little steep to improve a mountain lion’s love life. Someone suggested it could double as a pedestrian bridge for people, but the thought of crossing the freeway and running into a mountain lion going the other way seemed to be a bit of a problem. I imagine they’re going to drop that idea.
The idea of creating a cemetery located where the old, recently deceased Malibu Hotel was to be sited atop the hill at PCH and Malibu Canyon is actually moving ahead. The City recently received a proposed plan for a memorial park at that location and the developers are quite serious about moving this project ahead. Stay tuned
The Malibu retail scene appears to be shifting around. The Koss Center retail store Yosemite — a men’s retail store owned by the successful James Perse operation — shuttered its doors. Across the street in the Colony Plaza Shopping Center — owned by Stan Kronke — the 20-year retail store Theodore’s closed both its men and women’s stores, leaving some gaping holes in the center. Granita Restaurant has been closed almost 10 years and the location of Howard Spanier’s old copy and shipping store still remains empty.
Pacific Coast Highway claimed another fatality early this morning when a hit-and-run driver killed a young woman in her very early 20s. Quick work by the Sheriff’s Department and the hit-and-run driver was apparently apprehended on Kanan Dume Road on the Agoura side of the hill.
The commute on PCH is not going to get any easier either because the California Incline — which leads up to Santa Monica — has been deteriorating for years and is slated to be closed on April 15 for repairs, which they think will take a year to complete. It’s not just the roadway that has to be repaired, but the entire hillside has to be stabilized from years of hard use and weather erosion.
The City Council just finished a knock down, drag-out fight about the color of the Wells Fargo sign in the Trancas Center. I think some people in this town need to get a life.