Hamish Patterson is a carpenter, artist and self-described YouTube personality who is running in his second race for Malibu City Council. Patterson, 44, was born in Boston, Mass., but grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains and first moved to Malibu at age 15. He is running a dual campaign with fellow candidate Andy Lyon.
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 think it’s time to use that cache to solve our problems, and I don’t see it happening.
What is your background?
Carpenter/artist. I haven’t picked up my skill saw in about six months, which has been great. [Carpentry is] my bread-and-butter fall back, but… [YouTube] 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 [showed] 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 3,500 bucks of art immediately and just went to Chile for a while, like, “I’m going surfing now!” I’d love to paint, but I live in a small place up at Point Dume Club where I can’t make a mess.
What experience do you have in public policy or in private sector leadership roles?
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, Ore. to pursue my writing career, and got really involved in saving old-growth forests… that was my first engagement with the federal government so I was really active engaging the United States Forest Service
As that sort of morphed I got really involved with Portland’s drinking water supply… They were trying to switch from the gravity-fed [water supply] 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 … 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.
Then at a certain point like I faded out of that and I moved to Pennsylvania to run my girlfriend’s dude ranch. I started from the bottom and ended managing the whole dude ranch. Anything from taking reservations to running the bar to making sure the food showed up for hundreds of people.
What are your two specific things you want to achieve if you get on the council, and how will you achieve them?
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… 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’re not addressing it, that’s the problem. We’re being told that everything’s out of our hands…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. [The City Council should] 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 state 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 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.
Infrastructure
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 upgrade Water District 29 (in Malibu). So when I hear about Civic Center development, and the potential for them to have to treat 600,000 gallons 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.