From the Publisher/Arnold G. York
April Council Election
This Friday at 5 p.m. is the deadline for filing papers to run for City Council in the April election. The seats held by Ken Kearsley, Jeff Jennings and Joan House are open, and there have been persistent rumors that House has had it and might decide not to run. If it turns out she doesn’t run, then the period for filing papers is extended by five days. The reason for the extension period is, in the old days, incumbents would not infrequently act as if they were running and then step aside at the last moment for their own handpicked successor. After a few brawls at the election offices, the Legislature some years ago extended the period to file an extra five days if an incumbent decided not to run. So far, Jennings, Kearsley, John Mazza, Walter Keller, Efrom Fader, and a new face, Pamela Conley Ulich, have pulled papers. There are rumors galore about who else might be running, but no one is stepping forward. The three former planning commissioners, Richard Carrigan, Deirdre Roney and Robert Adler, all of whom recently left the commission under fire, have yet to decide to run. Malibu CAN, the zero-growth crowd funded by Ozzie Silna’s money that led the fight against Measure M, has been somewhat coy about its slate, although it’ll have to come clean by Friday afternoon. It’s pretty clear the community is, as usual, split. There are a number of people with heavy bucks to spend on the election and the campaign is going to be hard fought. Perhaps that has dampened people’s enthusiasm. Perhaps it’s that politics in Malibu is a tough job and many people ask themselves if they really need that kind of turmoil in their lives. All we political junkies are waiting.
PierView Café
It looks like they’ve already begun renovations on the old PierView Café, or at least there seems to be contractor-looking types walking in and out of the old place, which is always a good sign that something’s happening. It’s good to see something moving ahead.
Malibu Pier
Work on the Malibu Pier, on the other hand, appears to be stalling a bit, and it’s beginning to look like the old Alice’s Restaurant site won’t make the proposed opening next summer. The problem is the proposed contract between the state and the pier operator, and the dollars the state wants and what the restaurant operators feel they can pay. The final contract has yet to be signed. There have been some severe limitations placed on the pier, including septic restrictions imposed by the Regional Water Quality Control Board and the parking limitations placed by the California Coastal Commission. The small size of the restaurant, and the seating and parking limitations mean that only a very high-end restaurant could survive at that spot and make the pier pencil out. When the concession was put out to bid, only one bidder decided to try it. That’s the group that’s involved in the Lark Creek Inn in Marin County, which runs very upscale restaurants. One of the partners, chef Bradley Ogden, is a major culinary celebrity and restaurant owner. Chefs and their personal high-end restaurants have become a major draw in Las Vegas and the casinos appear to be in a bidding war, offering some very juicy deals. In comparison, it may be that the Malibu Pier deal is a bit dicier, involving long-term and substantial risks. The state is probably going to have to negotiate further, or terminate the deal and put it out for rebid. In any event, they’re probably going to have to change the pier deal, or perhaps just be its own master tenant. In the interim, the state and the onsite pier operator, Jefferson Wagner, are going to keep the pier open and run it on a more limited scale until the restaurant portion of the deal resolves itself, one way or another.
Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to do business in Malibu and difficulty translates into very expensive. Expensive ultimately gets passed through to the consumer, which for some people is not a problem, but does have the effect of driving out smaller Mom and Pop types of businesses. For example, we have wastewater problems in the Civic Center area and have had them for years. It’s primarily because the water tables are very high and septic systems don’t work well with high water tables. The Regional Water Quality Control Board wants us to clean it up; in fact, law mandates cleaning it up. It waited to see if we would pass Measure M, which included provisions for a waste treatment plant. After the defeat of M, it stopped waiting and is moving ahead on the beginning of enforcement in Malibu. That means that shopping centers are going to have to install major new, very expensive state-of-the-art septic systems. The centers pass through those costs, in the main, to the tenants who then pass it through to us, the consumers. We can expect some major increases in prices in Malibu just from that alone. Measure M may have not been an acceptable answer to a majority of the voters, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t solutions to some of these problems. It’s time for us to get behind some solutions or many of us are going to price ourselves out of this market.