The wind was up, Southern California Edison turned off the lights, and the city council meeting was rained out. You know, it would have been nice if it was really rained out, but actually, it was blown out. The fight over whether to release the independent attorneys’ findings about the Jefferson Wagner affidavit is also postponed, but that battle is brewing. By the discussion and vote when it finally happens, we’ll have an idea of what’s in it, and who wants it released and, who doesn’t.
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We’re soon going to have the new district lines drawn in California, created by an independent commission, so there are going to be some changes in who represents whom. For example, we are probably going to lose Congressman Ted Lieu and ultimately end up with a new member. Some members are going to lose their seats, depending on where the lines are drawn, and some longtime incumbents are going to find themselves running against each other. That’s the new politics in California.Â
In many other states, supercomputers are busy reconfiguring lines, so an electoral minority ends with the majority of seats in the U.S. House. Now, you can only get away with that if you control the state legislature and the governor’s office; then you can juggle the lines to not only keep you in power but even add seats if you do it right. The way you do it is to jam as many of the other guys’ voters into the same district, which leaves some very weirdly shaped districts, but it works; in fact, it has always worked. The reason the Democratic Party figures the House is going to flip is twofold. One, the president’s party almost invariably loses seats in the first election after a new president is elected and, second, the Democrats lost many lower state legislative elections so the Republicans get to draw the lines. There are some states where voters are split 50 percent Democratic, and 50 percent Republican, and yet one party has seven congressional seats, and other only three seats. There’s nothing new about this and messing with district lines is as American as apple pie, I think someone once said. The original gerrymander was brought about by Governor Gerry of Massachusetts in 1812 and the purpose was to beat back the Federalists. It must have worked because you hardly see any Federalists around these days.
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We’ve all seen opioid deaths skyrocketing in every state and county at an enormous human and economic cost. Many of the counties and cities are trying to recover the costs of the epidemic: the medical costs, the rehabilitation costs, the mental health costs. The numbers can run into the billions. Generally, they’ve been suing on a public nuisance theory, which works in some places but not in others. Recently, a couple of judges—one in California and one in Oklahoma—kicked the cases out of court, saying that public nuisance claims don’t cover this kind of thing. But in the state of Ohio, a case just went to trial before a jury, and the first verdict just came down holding, that CVS, Walgreens and Walmart substantially contributed to the crises of opioid overdoses and the judge gets to set the damages in those cases. The numbers could be enormous, running into the hundreds of millions. The two plaintiff counties charge that the epidemic cost them over $1 billion each and they want to be reimbursed. Locally, we have more than an opioid problem; we have an opioid/fentanyl problem, which is much more deadly. People are taking drugs laced with fentanyl and just not waking up. We’ve had deaths from that here in Malibu. But more about that in a later column.
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We finally have reached a critical mass of COVID-19 vax refusers and, in the face of what could be another jump in cases and deaths this winter, some entities are finally cracking down. The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District just fired 13 of their employees for non-vax compliance. The same thing will probably follow, initially in some other public employments like police and fire, but that’s a bit more complicated because of negotiated employment union contracts.
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In California, everything ultimately ends up in court, and Malibu is no exception.
Two hot-button local cases are on their way to appellate courts as I write this column. The first is the Lent case, where the California Coastal Commission slapped Dr. and Mrs. Lent with a $4.2 million fine, or administrative penalty, or whatever they call it, for failing to open a beach access on Dog Beach here in Malibu. In their paperwork to the Court of Appeals, they claim they were deprived of a fair hearing and had not been able to subpoena witnesses, cross-examine anyone, present their own witnesses or evidence, and then still only given a limited time to make their case—probably about the time they give you to fight an average traffic ticket, except this ticket came with a $4.2 million fine. In a more recent case, the Malibu Planning Commission just voted down a homeowner’s application to build an ADU (accessory dwelling unit, aka a granny flat) for their aging granny with health problems. Then it went to the city council, who agreed with the planning commission and turned down the request. The State of California is in the midst of a tremendous housing shortage and has passed all sorts of legislation to encourage, actually almost mandate the allowing of building of granny flats on R-1 lots, but to no avail. Malibu, along with a bunch of equally high-end cities, seems to have never quite seen an application for a granny flat that meets its demanding standards. Whatever is presented is either too wide or too narrow, too high, too bulky, too far from the main house, too attached to the main house, too close to an ESHA, or too far from the ESHA, and on and on and on. As much as they would like to approve it, this one just doesn’t quite meet the standards, so come back another dozen times, and we’ll see if we can work it out. Forgetaboutit!