Opponents say deal allows MBC owner Jerry Perenchio to connect his Malibu Colony properties to any wastewater facility proposed for Chili Cook-Off site, which would allow development of up to 56 homes.
By Jonathan Friedman/Special to the Malibu Times
Frustrated by what he considered to be opposition without having an alternative solution, at the August 5 City Council meeting Councilmember Jeff Jennings invited any Malibu Bay Company (MBC) Development Agreement opponent to offer another idea.
“Give us another plan that isn’t completely unworkable, or illegal or a pie in the sky,” he said.
MBC opposition leader Ozzie Silna then stood, accepting the challenge. Silna said he had a plan that would take five minutes to explain, but City Attorney Christi Hogin said they couldn’t hear him, because it was not on the agenda.
At Monday night’s council meeting this week, Steve Uhring requested a special meeting on behalf of the out-of-town Silna, so he could explain his proposal. The councilmembers said they did not want to hold a special meeting, but agreed to have Silna’s plan placed on a future agenda.
Silna later offered to show his plan to The Malibu Times, which involves the city attempting to acquire other Civic Center properties on which to place a water treatment facility that he felt were better than the Chili Cook-Off site for geological reasons, one of them being the MBC’s Knoll property. But his written proposal did not explain an alternative plan for what to do with the Chili Cook-Off site, which, as part of the current development agreement, the city would purchase and possibly put a facility there.
The city has said that to allow the MBC to develop its various properties, including the Chili Cook-Off site, under the zoning laws without an agreement would mean far more development than anything in this agreement or its predecessors. But Silna contends the city has not taken several constraints into consideration when determining that number, including the ability to dispose of wastewater on site and some properties that, he says, have environmental conditions that prevent development.
No holds barred
Although the meeting was just a mere formality to place the agreement on the November ballot, it turned into something that resembled the beginning of a no-holds-barred campaign.
“It [the campaign] doesn’t look like it’s going to suffer from any more accuracy than a lot of the other campaigns that have gone on in town,” Jennings said in reaction to Uhring’s presentation that suggested the agreement paves the way for MBC president Jerry Perenchio to develop 56 homes on his Malibu Colony property.
Uhring looked to a part of the agreement that allows Perenchio to hook up his properties, including the now infamous golf course, to any wastewater treatment facility that may be built on the Chili Cook-Off site. He said that would solve Perenchio’s wastewater issues, allowing him to replace the golf course and the surrounding area on the 14-acre property with a 56-home development. Also, he questioned why, in his belief, part of the agreement had been kept quiet.
“Why is it that nobody else in the city, the planning commission, had any knowledge about this latest arrangement … until the development agreement was posted in front of everybody?” he asked
At the August 4 Planning Commission meeting, all the commissioners said they were unaware of that feature. And Commissioner Richard Carrigan said Scott Albright, the city planner who worked on the deal, had told him he also had been unfamiliar with it before the agreement came before the council the next night. Albright did not return calls to confirm if he, in fact, said that.
But City Attorney Christi Hogin fired back at the August 5 council meeting that this had been part of the agreement since the beginning of the revision process. A look at the June 18 agenda, the first date a meeting took place to discuss the revised agreement, reveals that this was included in the MBC’s list of agreement items, although it did not appear in the staff summary report. At the July 9 meeting, the item was alluded to in the staff report, but it appeared nowhere in the staff report for the Planning Commission’s recommendation meeting later that month.
However, Hogin said, in a telephone interview on Monday, that not everything was rehashed in each staff report, and that the reports instead worked as an add-on to the information in the previous ones. She said the whole thing was irrelevant, because Perenchio could not start developing that property anyway.
“This is as made up of an issue as it could be,” she said.
For Perenchio to build on the property, Hogin said he would need to turn it into a subdivision. And before that were to take place, the city could change the zoning of the area to prevent him from building the 56 homes.