Control battles are brewing
In every corner of Malibu there seems to a battle brewing. It’s become apparent that we’re losing more and more control over our own community, either to outside agencies or to people and politicians within the community who want things their own way and to hell with the rest of us.
Things that you would think would be simple— like building a park at Trancas, where there would be a practice field for the kids and a dog park where you could exercise your pet— have run into a wall of opposition. To hear the opponents describe it you might think that the city wanted to build a toxic waste dump, not a park for kids. It absolutely makes no sense to me. The city goes through a long political process to make a decision about a park, takes it before the Planning Commission and then the council, then holds community workshops and hears scores of speakers, and makes a decision. Battle over, right? No, wrong! Next, that great phantom organization, the Malibu Township Council, files a lawsuit and just this week was in court to try and get a judge to issue a temporary restraining order to block the construction of the park, which has already started. The judge turned them down but they’ll back in December, looking for a preliminary injunction to again try and stop the park. These lawsuits don’t come cheap. Who is paying for it and why? And how about the majority of us who want to see a new park?
Council arrogance
You would think that with so many obstreperous citizens, the city would want to do everything out in the open, with as much public participation as possible so you don’t get this kind of opposition. Again you would be wrong. Now the City Council wants to go ahead and move its meetings to Tuesday nights to make it more convenient for the staff, they say. I suspect it’s because they don’t want you, the citizens, to be able to see what they’re doing while it’s still fresh.
Both The Malibu Times and the Malibu Surfside News go to print Tuesday nights and have for years, long before there was a City of Malibu. The reason you’re able to read about what the City Council is doing while the news is fresh is that both papers are able to cover the meetings on Monday nights and have stories ready for the printing press in time to be on the streets by Wednesday. Switch to Tuesdays and we can’t do that. In Los Angeles, printing press time for weekly newspapers is very tight, particularly on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and it’s difficult to change. But this isn’t just a question of convenience, or having reporters working late into the night to try to bring you press coverage. It’s an issue of arrogance, of politicians treating their constituents and the press as an annoyance, something to be disregarded if it’s inconvenient. They scream, stomp and shout when they’re treated arrogantly, but that doesn’t seem to apply when they’re the ones being arrogant.
Ditto the Coastal Commission and the RWQCB
I get a lot of whining from the City Council about how we’re being mistreated by the California Coastal Commission and the Regional Water Quality Control Board, and they’re not wrong. For example, somehow the Coastal Commission believes that whether or not Malibu High School has lights on its football field is a major issue of coastal protection. I can actually remember voting for the Coastal Act because we were all afraid of rampant coastal development. I don’t think we ever conceived of a commission that would govern what kind of shrubbery we would be allowed to plant, or what color we could paint your house.
The Regional Water Quality Control Board doesn’t like septic systems. They want us to have a sewer, ultimately throughout Malibu. The fact that it’s going to be incredibly expensive, and in most areas of questionable necessity, doesn’t seem to matter much. The board already has its mind made up and we are about to go through a charade of a hearing about whether or not to impose a moratorium and possibly a prohibition on septic systems, which is a gigantic hammer to force us to build a sewer.
But then I see our own city council acting in the same arbitrary way and proposing to shift around the council meeting days, which hurts the rest of us while making it more convenient for them, and I get upset.
I believe this is a make or break issue for the newspapers. I for one couldn’t and wouldn’t support any candidate for city council unless they agreed to keep the council meetings on Monday night as they have been since Malibu became a city in 1991.