Council issues plea to residents to get involved.
By Jonathan Friedman / Assistant Editor and Nora Fleming / Special to The Malibu Times
The largest municipal project in Malibu history has been unable to create much enthusiasm among local residents. The city conducted well-advertised workshops last Wednesday and on Saturday at City Hall to gather public input on the Legacy Park project, but both sessions included more consultants and city staff in attendance than residents.
City Councilmember John Sibert expressed his frustration at Monday’s City Council meeting about the lack of interest in the workshops, which were both attended by fewer than 10 residents.
“This was the place to get your oar in the water and get your comments in about the project,” Sibert said. “I’m sorry we didn’t have more folks here from Malibu.”
He encouraged residents to begin to study the project and attend future workshops.
“Please, I want you to take a hard look at Legacy Park and what’s planned,” Sibert said to Monday’s council audience. “Please, this is important for this city.”
The project has a two-fold purpose of transforming the 20-acre property located along Pacific Coast Highway between Webb Way and Cross Creek Road into a multihabitat, passive recreation park. It will be a part of the city’s storm water management program, which includes the nearby treatment center on Civic Center Way.
The park will capture excess storm water runoff when the treatment facility is filled to capacity. The storm water will then move to the facility as room becomes available. The water will be treated and later discharged into the Malibu watershed at bacteria levels acceptable to the Regional Water Quality Control Board. Some of the water will also be reused.
The draft environmental impact report for the project was released in May. The deadline to submit comments and questions was Monday. City planner Stephanie Danner said she received 26 letters regarding the project. Look for information about the content of those letters in next week’s issue of The Malibu Times.
Danner said she expects staff and consultants will take approximately eight weeks to respond to the public comments and questions. The responses will be included in a final EIR. This document will be presented, along with the project, to the Planning Commission for a recommendation, and later to the City Council for a vote. City officials have a goal of getting the project approved and sent out to bid for construction before the end of the year.
City officials have estimated the cost of the project at $12.5 million to $15 million. The city has garnered approximately $6 million. This includes $2.5 million from Santa Monica College’s Measure S bond fund, $1 million from the county, a $2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation and $500,000 from various donors. Last week, city officials traveled to Sacramento to promote the project as well as to address other issues. Councilmember Sharon Barovsky said at Monday’s council meeting she is optimistic based on the feedback she received during the trip that money for the project could be coming from the state.
“Legacy Park is the one thing in Sacramento that everybody is supporting because they really know it is supporting water quality and habitat restoration,” Barovsky said. “Money is not flowing up in Sacramento as we all know, but there is bond money left over, and I’m hoping we get a fair share of that.”
If the city is unable to collect enough money for the project through grants and donations, it will most likely fill the gap through the selling of certificates of participation, or COPs, which are similar to bonds but do not require voter approval. The city raised most of the money to buy the park property from the Malibu Bay Co. in 2006 through the issuance of COPs. The city would pay off the COPs with the rent money it receives from the three commercial structures on Legacy Park.
Meanwhile, even with the Legacy Park project, the city’s watershed pollution problem will not be solved. It must do something about its wastewater issues. Originally, the two major pollutants were supposed to be dealt with in one large project, but the wastewater issue has long since been separated. The basic plan for dealing with wastewater pollution is for an installation of a facility in the Civic Center area that nearby property owners would connect to. There are many issues still surrounding this project, including where the treatment facility would be built. The plan for several years has been to build it on a property behind the Civic Center owned by Pepperdine University and two minor stakeholders. Pepperdine had offered to donate a portion of this property for that purpose But there have been difficulties with this, including infighting among the owners of the property.