Craig Foster’s recent letter in The Malibu Times plays very loose with the facts. [Response to letter “Independence needed,” Sept. 26]
Craig dismisses his Malibu Park neighbor’s concerns with the MHS stadium lighting and the proposed lighting for the new ridge top parking lot and opines, “I strongly believe that in an independent Malibu school district, our community would have the chance to work out these competing interests in advance.” This suggests if these community conflicts had been addressed by locals (such as the AMPS group), they would have never occurred.
What the letter doesn’t tell you is that these “conflicts” were actually instigated by leaders of his AMPS organization. The campaign to install stadium lighting at MHS was led by one of his AMPS officers. Leaders of AMPS misled the Malibu community when they promised that no taxpayer dollars would be used to install this stadium lighting, and they unilaterally walked away from a Community Compromise Agreement that would have eliminated the conflict over the MHS lights.
AMPS leaders ignored Malibu Park residents who complained that MHS parking lot lights were shining into their bedrooms and they sat on the MHS Improvement BB Advisory Committee as Malibu Representatives, yet never championed a single initiative that would have resolved the differences between MHS and Malibu Park residents. AMPS accuses the current school district leadership with ignoring the concerns raised by Malibu Residents, yet their track record shows them doing exactly the same thing. If you are living in or near Malibu Park, that is a little bit scary.
If this group really wants to be embraced by the Malibu Community, an AMPS leader could step up and help resolve this conflict between MHS and it’s Malibu Park neighbors so we can all get back to dealing with education issues? That would be the type of leadership we could all support.
Steve Uhring