The following was addressed to Eden Concoff whose letter appeared last week.
I support limited sports field lighting at Malibu High School for football, but your letter completely makes the case why we should not make public policy based on the wants of teenagers. You simply do not have the broader vision of all that is involved in this issue. Teens have poor impulse control. You want what you want when you want it. You are very young and issues dear to your heart are very urgent and compelling.
The City of Malibu was founded on the principal of keeping it rural. If you look at a nighttime satellite photo of the USA there are huge areas – greater Los Angeles included – that have so lit up the night skies that you can no longer see the stars. There is a name for it: light pollution. Malibu has laws that govern how many lights, how bright, their direction one can have on both private and public properties in a document called the Local Coastal Plan or LCP. These laws are designed to protect our very special rural environment. I hold that the majority of Malibu property owners and residents do not want to establish a precedent that could lead to the widespread and continual sports field lighting like Palisades High, which you so warmly praise in your letter. It is in fact a real nightmare to thousands of us.
The challenge in front of our City Council is to find a legal framework to change the Local Coastal Plan that will permit the use of temporary lights for a limited number of night football games. It is based on changing what some 40 Malibu “institutions” can do for nighttime lighting. Since institutions include a broad array of schools, churches and government facilities, changing this law does not only impact Malibu High and the seven or eight homeowners whose wishes and legal rights you so easily dismiss, but it threatens to open a Pandora’s Box of potential new lighting that could erase Malibu’s cherished starry night skies. It is a clumsy and heavy-handed approach that can cause far more damage than the problem it is supposed to fix.
I urge the City Council to reject this shotgun approach and work to craft a proper solution that will get you and your friends the limited sports field lighting you want without further damaging Malibu’s environment.
Marshall Thompson