the thief
Councilwoman Barovsky has suggested that in my opposition to the Trancas Park design, I started out with one set of requests and then when I got what I wanted, I changed the goal. It is true that the newly revised and approved and still bad Trancas Park design does save my own personal property, which gives me a different vantage point for having this debate.
When my own property was at risk, I could be dismissed as NIMBY; now that my own property is not at risk and I’m fighting against the precedent being set (of poor public representation process), which affects all Malibu citizens, I’m told that I shouldn’t complain because I got what I wanted for myself personally. But that is like having someone try to steal your car, and just because you fight and get your car back you no longer care that the thief is at large.
The city’s processes are the thief (and under that umbrella I include many things, such as poor project management skills, citizens’ lack of participation from naivety or from leaders having infused a sense of futility, various city officials’ intentional disregard for existing environmental laws, self serving motives, and knee-jerk we-they ego reactions), and this thief will try to steal again, unless many things in the processes are changed.
It is not mean when I point out that Sharon Barovsky’s statement (intended to validate and to squelch questions about her vote) that she voted for the plan that the workshop participants came out with contradicts the irrefutable fact that the plan she voted for was first presented to the public three weeks after the workshop; it would be easier for me personally, and uncaring, not to take the stress of pointing that out.
For me just to say that I got what was good for myself and what happens next is no skin off my back, whether or not people’s original intentions were good-misrepresenting what the public demand has been is one of the things that harm the process of inviting and responding to real public input.
Lynne Norton