City Council Candidate Profile: June Louks

A political newcomer and founder of the Malibu Agricultural Society, June Louks looks to foster community discourse and encourage more public participation if elected to the city council. Louks, an architect who also spent 16 years working for Mary Kay Cosmetics, has lived with her husband and four daughters in Point Dume for eight years. 

Your husband, Jeff Louks, works in commercial real estate. Does that conflict at all with what your campaign platform has been to protect against commercialization? 

He’s a commercial real estate broker and he is in full support of protecting our rural character and safeguarding our environment, and as a broker, I think he sees the advantage of protecting our rural character and our environment…I’m running on the Malibu vision and mission statement, and I think it’s our common ground. It’s what brings together the real estate agents, the businesses, the residents. 

What issues have you had problems with that have been voted on by the city council? 

One of the catalysts for me was seeing our city council not support the formula retail ordinance… it seemed that everyone I talked to in the neighborhood, because I talked to a lot of people about it, that they supported it, yet they wouldn’t speak out because they were either connected with developers or real estate agents. 

When you’re at the Country Mart or at the Malibu Village, do you see a reflection of the Malibu you love or do you see something else?

It’s becoming like a Rodeo Drive and a shopping destination. 

And you believe the Rob Reiner ballot initiative could change that or reverse it? What do you think it could do? 

Foster businesses that serve our community rather than businesses oriented toward regional shoppers. And as residents, why wouldn’t we stand up for that? And my gut tells me that that’s what the regional shoppers really come here for is to get a sense of Malibu and to get a sense of our rustic rural character. 

At the debates and candidate forums, you have responded to some questions by admitting that you didn’t know or weren’t sure about the issue. Do you feel that if you’re elected you would be playing catch up on a lot of things? 

I’ve gotten a lot better. I have a strong values system and voters I think will vote for me because they share the value system of wanting to protect Malibu and keep Malibu, Malibu…I’m a quick study. I don’t know if you noticed that, but it doesn’t take me long to get up to speed. When we were building our house, I took the code home, I read it over the next two nights, I built it in three months [and] we got it approved from the city. 

Let’s talk about the high school. Are you satisfied with the progress that has or hasn’t been made as far as figuring out what might be wrong at that campus? 

No, they have not addressed it…I think it happened because we’re a part of a larger school district, which is the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. They’re 84 percent, we’re 16 percent of the vote. We’re just an extra in their movie. 

Do you think the district ignored the problem when it came up? 

I think it was brushed aside. It’s hard to say exactly, but I think the problem is that we’re not our own school district. 

Are you comfortable sending your eighth-grade daughter in the high school next year? 

No…We are weighing our options. And we’re also looking at private schools…I’m very sensitive to the toxicity issue, and it’s not only the existing infrastructure and the soil that wasn’t remediated. It’s also the rodenticide that they’ve been putting out every month. 

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