These past couple of weeks the battle has raged hot and heavy over the Malibu Local Coastal Plan and who’s going to get to write it. I suspect there are many of you, like myself, who are just sitting back and scratching your heads and saying to yourselves, “Frankly Scarlett, do I really give a dam?”
For as long as I can remember Malibu has been fighting about plans. The city’s residents and politicians have fought about general plans, specific plans, interim zoning plans and not so interim zoning plans. At each and every juncture one side or the other is claiming that the council plan is either the end of world or, alternatively, the savior of man. When you think about it, the City of Malibu really hasn’t built very much in the last 10 years, nor did it in the previous 10 years when the city belonged to the county. So I’m beginning to wonder whether fighting about imaginary developments is kind of Malibu’s local sport.
Malibu certainly does seem to have some real needs, but the population seems to spend all of its time, energy and budget not meeting those needs, but fighting about the plan to meet those needs. Malibu needs a community center, a teen center, a senior citizen center, a city hall, some additional community rooms, a park, a whole bunch of ball fields, some low-cost day care, and some serious monetary assistance to its schools (not the nickel and dime stuff we’re proposing). It also needs a 24-hour emergency room plus some additional commercial buildings and some moderate-cost housing so people who work here can afford to live here. None of it has happened. All Malibu citizens do is fight about plans.
I can begin to understand why the state (and this includes the governor, senate, assembly, Coastal Commission and the Regional Water Quality Control Board) thinks Malibu is full of a bunch of elitists with heads screwed on cockeyed, and is simply fed up with them and wants them gone.
As far as state legislators are concerned, Malibu can hold workshops and hearings on its LCP until everybody is terminally geriatric. In the meantime, they’re going to go ahead and write and certify Malibu’s Local Coastal Plan and get rid of the “cockeyed elitists” as quickly as they can.
The citizens of Malibu elected a council to make decisions. They should let them do it and get on with it. This permanent filibuster by a group of people who really don’t want anything but their own way is getting the city nowhere. It’s very expensive and results only in matters being taken out of Malibu’s hands.
I’ve been in and around Sacramento for many years, originally as a state Senate staffer, and the last six years as a member of the board of directors of the California Newspaper Publishers Association. I’ve lobbied lots of bills, and one thing I know with absolute certainty is, if you don’t present a unified front in Sacramento you can be assured you’re going to get killed.
Now we have the council sending up a draft local coastal plan and Frank Angel and the Malibu Township Council crowd saying to Sen. John Burton and anybody else who will listen, just ignore our elected leadership and listen to us.
Guess what. Now they’re not going to listen to either of side because to have two groups at the table singing different tunes is the same as having no one at the table.
I’m sorry to say there was a time when the Malibu Township Council, which has a long and honorable history, meant something. Now it’s sort of become the city’s Elba. It’s where defeated politicians and their geriatric apparatchiks go to scheme and try to plot their return to power, which I suspect is what this opposition to the LCP is all about. They spent years writing their own LCP and sent it to the Coastal Commission, which pronounced it DOA and promptly put it in the round file.
It’s time everybody moved on from this sort of silliness and begin to get something done. If people don’t like what the council does, let’s replace them and get a new council. But to elect a group of people to do a job and then constantly try to block them from doing that job results in nothing but stalemate. Some people in Malibu are happy with stalemate because it used to mean nothing happens. But it’s becoming apparent that the world has lost patience with Malibu.
Today, stalemate means someone else is going to decide for you.