What’s happening around town?
After ten plus years as our Editor and Associate Publisher, Laura Tate is leaving The Malibu Times. During the period of her leadership the newspaper has grown in size and quality due in large measure to Laura’s ability, her taste and her energy. She launched the Malibu Times Magazine and guided its growth over the last eight plus years. Karen and I are both deeply appreciative of what she has done and she will be sorely missed.
I’ll be taking back the role of editor, with the able assistance of Knowles Adkisson and Carly Erickson on the newspaper and Leslie Wade on the magazine.
The Malibu City Council has decided to investigate the possibility of Malibu forming its own separate school district. Currently, Malibu students make up about 20% of the student population of the school district. However, because school board members are elected systemwide, there has been no Malibu representative on the school board since 2008 because the overwhelming majority of the voting population is in Santa Monica. As a practical matter, the Santa Monica Renters Rights political organization has long held sway over SM politics, which means that most political decisions are made in SM with little more than lip service to Malibu.
A number of the current school board members don’t seem terribly disturbed at the prospect of Malibu leaving. I suspect that may be because Santa Monica gives, through a variety of means, $13.5 million to the school system every year, and it may well be that Malibu directly or indirectly gets 20% of those dollars, roughly $2.7 million. There is some substantial debate about the numbers and we probably won’t have any definitive answers until after the study of the school district’s finances is completed. By then we will know if a separate Malibu School District is viable, or what kind of money we will have to raise, probably via a parcel tax to make it work. Schools are more than just about educating children, although that is the major priority. Schools are among the largest community organizations in the city and bring many parents into contact with other parents and into the city’s political process. It’s one way people integrate themselves into the community. Good schools are also inextricably tied into property values. For many people, buying in Malibu means that they can avoid the cost of private schools for the kids and instead spend the extra dollars on a house.
The most recent fracas is related to the school board’s decision to require that the money contributed by parents essentially be spread out among all the district schools. Admittedly, there are enormous disparities in what individual schools raise. The effect of the new policy is that parents who have contributed to their local school would see some of that money shifted to other schools. Frankly, the board’s decision made no sense to me. The end result of the new policy, I believe, will be to dry up many of those contributions or send many Malibu kids into private schools. It appeared to me that the school board handled it all very clumsily, as if they didn’t much care what Malibu thought, one way or another. I can’t help but feel that the decision had a lot more to do with the electoral and the ethnic politics of Santa Monica then any great concern with the local school kids.
In other matters the city is still struggling to try and find a new home for the skate park. They’ve been talking about various temporary homes at Bluffs Park or the La Paz property, or the Adamson Hotel property but so far no definitive progress.
We also appear to have a growing problem of the beaches eroding. I was shocked recently when I went down to Broad Beach and saw how much of it is gone. After the 1993 fire, when our house burned down, we rented a beach house for two and one half years between Zuma Beach and Broad Beach. It was a wonderful old rundown beach cottage, since torn down, and the best part was the sand dunes in the front (facing the ocean) of the house, covered with vines and looking very much like Cape Cod on the New England coast.
Today most of that is gone and the homeowners are having to spend a fortune to try and restore the beach. Whether it’s the weather cycle or global climate change or just construction north of Malibu isn’t clear, but whatever it is, it looks to be long term and very expensive.