Hey, Sharon Barovsky! Respectfully, you guys built the wrong park for our Civic Center. In 1999, the city ascertained Malibu residents were short 19 athletic fields. Yet our city ignored this crying need and spent every drop of available grant money, plus $1 million in city funds, to build Legacy Park, a wastewater treatment facility that serves a very narrow slice of Malibu. Instead of assessing nearby commercial properties for treating parking lot runoff, all 27 miles of Malibu is paying for a “park” that we and our kids can’t use. The park was designed by “biologists, ecologists, landscape architects and engineers,” wrote Sharon. You’ll notice she left kids, parents, coaches and park designers off that list. I have actually found solitude and quiet while walking through this sad legacy of a park. At 3 p.m. on a recent Friday afternoon, I was alone there. In solitude, I pondered: I’ve never seen a “rural” community without a city park at its center, where kids and adults can gather and play. Faux wilderness is an expensive, inappropriate use for a city center. And designing a park to purposefully drive people away is hardly preserving rural character.
After this municipal weedpatch inevitably catches fire, we can beg Mr. Perenchio to drop the pointless deed restrictions and let Malibu build a real park. A skatepark would be nice, maybe a couple of fields for the soccer kids near the sump pond. Sharon, et al, did a great job, but accomplished the wrong task.
Hans Laetz