It’s always difficult to come back from vacation. After a wonderful week in Aspen, Colo., I was ready to come back to work — that’s until I actually got back to work and found all the same problems I had left behind. What we all need is a “vacation fairy” who cleans up your desk while you’re gone so we come back to a clean slate. Some bright kid will probably create an app some day, but too late for me.
Aspen is an extraordinary place, high up in the saddle of the mountains, scenic with rivers running through it, good fly fishing in the summer and skiing in the winter. It’s a real town that in the late 1880s was a mining boomtown, until the mines played out, and then it was a bust. It sort of spent 50 years in a state of suspended animation with nothing happening, until a few visionary moneyed people from Chicago began to turn it around. This time they did it right. For example, they found a European town that decided to go modern a few years ago and bought up all the bricks from their streets en mass, with bricks fired in 1901,and then laid them down in the center of Aspen for walking streets. They pushed the automobile away from the center of town where they could. Then they created small streams running through the center of town and planted trees that are now mature. The Chicago industrialists saw it needed more and funded the Aspen Institute for music, art and intellectual pursuits, and over the years it has become world famous. Their zoning is very strict, but they have preserved the historical Aspen, with Victorians and 1890s kinds of buildings. The town has a very strong vision and residents are very protective of that look, that aesthetic, and they have managed to integrate a very strong environmentalism with an aesthetic living environment both private and public.
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On returning, I went to the Malibu city council meeting, which I usually avoid like the plague. It was as bereft of any vision of what we want Malibu to be. We seem to only know what we don’t want to be. It was about plumbing codes and septic rules; it was all about the mundane minutia of bureaucracy, as soulless and lacking in any vision as Barstow. We like to think of ourselves as the cutting edge of environmental protection, but the truth is, we are not. The environment is no place without people, as some seem to want it to be. Go out and take a good hard look at Malibu, the Pacific Coast Highway, the streets that can’t be walked, garbage all along the sides of PCH and a Civic Center consisting of a series of interconnected shopping centers without any overall theme. The only aesthetic we have is because a few developers and center owners have good taste coupled with a few limited city improvements.
One of the central topics of discussion at the city council meeting was the new rules relating to failing — or almost failing, or maybe-not-so-good — septic systems. Various council members wondered why it is that the citizens can’t seem to understand the new rules for septic systems and why they are all upset and keep calling the council members. Let me tell you what was never said. In opting to continue as we have with individual and increasingly more expensive septic systems, we are opting for probably the most expensive solution to the management of our sewage. If you have an older system, and many do, and you appear on the city’s radar, you better figure you’re going to spend at least $50,000 to fix, or anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 to replace your septic system with new technology. Maybe an old system will last 50-60 years before giving out. I’ll admit, the new septic systems are masterpieces of expensive engineering and electronics. The fact is that governments generally hate septic systems because they are difficult to manage and they are always pushing to make them failsafe, which of course is an engineering impossibility. I think back that LA county wanted to build a sewer system for the entire community of Malibu and it was going to cost us $10,000 per lot and we went ballistic. People screamed that if we get sewers we’re going to have unlimited development, so in reaction we became a city. Other people then said, “OK, we’re a city now, we control our own development, so let’s build a sewer or a bunch of small sewers and fix the problem.” The environmentalists went nuts that we couldn’t trust the council, so sewers were out. What we got in return going forward is that everyone of us is our own little sanitation district, with our own little hi-tech septic plant, with enormous costs of fixing, installing and monitoring a very sensitive and complicated system.
Be careful what you wish for, because sometimes we get what we want and it’s a disaster or it comes with a hell of a high price tag.