I am not a voter in Malibu. I do not own property in Malibu. I do receive much of my mail in Pacific Palisades. However, I do pay taxes in Malibu. All who buy goods, rent real estate, register vehicles and pay taxes anywhere in the county help support services here in Malibu.
Like many thousands of people who own properties in Malibu, I cannot be a legal voter in Malibu. But I have rented studios from Malibu to Oxnard for the last 23 years and been along the coast for over 40 years. The political striations on maps drawn for political purposes mean less to me than all the places where the hills meet the sea.
Mr. Kearsley is correct when he concludes I am no financial advisor. But what little I know of bonds, secured or not, is that you must pay them off. The Chili Cook-off site and the Malibu lumberyard would be a deal at some price, but not the price that was lobbied for and paid. However, I am an observer. I saw this train rushing down the track at an ever-increasing speed. In the cab, were people holding verbal guns to the heads of the engineers. And in the cars behind, future generations of Malibuites sat, not knowing what to expect, hoping only for their best interests to be served. Further down the track, I saw the ambush-the rocks on the tracks and the modern equivalent of Black Bart ready to plunder the train and future generations. Black Bart knew he could never have developed the Chili Cook-off site because it was a wetland and he saw the huge delays that happened to development plans in Marina del Rey concerning the Ballona Creek wetlands. But he found perfect foils, people who were willing to spend “other people’s money.”
I saw this train wreck coming. I could have stood there and just enjoyed the spectacle. Instead, I thought the people on the train should be warned. Perhaps, I was wrong and cynically reckoned that all such victims deserve their fate.
V. Gerald Scordan