In this week’s newspaper there is a letter to the editor from Efrom Fader, the president of the Malibu Township Council. I suspect that some of you who have been here for less than a lifetime may well be wondering just what the Malibu Township Council (MTC) might be and who do they really represent?
To answer that question you need a little history.
Many years ago, in the late 1940s / early ’50s or so, long before Malibu was a city, at a time when it was part of the outskirts of the county, a local organization called the Malibu Township Council formed to be a local voice. The Township Council communicated with the county supervisor and his local deputy to let the county know what the Malibu community wanted.
Over the years, the organization, being the only local political voice in the community, was relatively effective. It was part of the resistance to a massive overbuilding of Malibu, which was in county plans, and to help stop other things like a marina, a freeway over the top of the mountains and, its major accomplishment, stopping a nuclear power plant scheduled for our local shoreline. Serving on the Malibu Township Council allowed our future leaders to get politically seasoned. Many of our city’s leadership cut their political teeth serving on the MTC.
But then cityhood came along and many on the MTC gave up advisory power for real cityhood political power. The MTC sort of became surplusage, but continued to stumble on, looking for a role for itself.
Someone died and left it a little money, so the MTC soldiered on, running some programs like political forums. In fact, the MTC is holding a forum this Saturday to discuss the proposed Civic Center guidelines.
Theoretically, the members of the MTC, who come from different geographic areas of Malibu, elect a representative to the MTC council. But the reality is that very few people participate in the process and you tend to see the same faces associated with the MTC year after year after year. Since cityhood, the MTC heir political power has waned substantially.
Lately, it’s been a place that the zero-growthers group goes to wait, sort of a shadow government in exile, hoping some day to come back into the sun. While there, they typically take pot shots at whomever is on the council that they’d like to replace with one of their own. That’s what this nonsense is all about relating to Christi Hogin moving over from city manager to city attorney and this equally nonsensical suggestion that somehow she and Councilmember Sharon Barovsky were in cahoots five to 10 years ago in connection with a lawsuit.
The background on the lawsuit is that in the early 1990s Barovsky caught her foot in a hole at a construction site on Malibu Road and sustained a bad ankle fracture. It required two surgeries before it was finally set. I know it was a bad fracture because I tried personal injury cases for many years, and ankle fractures requiring surgery are usually fracture dislocations, typically requiring pinning and plates. Even if the surgeon does a great job, there are almost invariably long-term impacts — arthritic changes in the joint and lots of medical expenses. Also, at a construction site on a city street, there are loads of defendants, usually the contractor, the subcontractor, the city, and just about anyone else who touches the job.
When an injury occurs the insurance companies take over, select their own attorneys and direct the litigation. Large cities, like Los Angeles, may have their own city attorney staffs, but small cities typically let insurance company attorneys handle it. In fact, smaller cities generally have no choice since it’s the insurance carrier that pays the tab.
In this case the medical bills were very large and the final settlement was in the neighborhood of $75,000 with the City of Malibu’s carrier, I’ve been advised, putting in $7,500 of the overall settlement, which seems to me to be relatively modest. Settlements by governmental entities have to be approved by the governing body, the council for example, but those approvals are typically pro forma, because it’s the insurance company’s money that usually pays the settlement. And it is known, from experience, that insurance companies are fairly hard-nosed in deciding whether or not to settle.
This whole issue, to put it mildly, is a tempest in a teapot, with nothing more than a political agenda behind it. Someone is blowing a lot of smoke around because someone, or their friend, wants to run for the Barovsky council seat, which is up for grabs in 2002. This is just an early part of the political campaign.