The City Council also votes to hire an ethics consultant to oversee the campaign. Additionally, several people associated with Trancas Riders and Ropers complain to the council about sheepherding classes taking place at the facility.
By Jonathan Friedman / Assistant Editor
The decision to place a proposal on the April 11 election ballot to increase city council member term limits riled some activists attending Monday night’s council meeting.
Malibu will be asked to choose two candidates to fill City Council seats that are being contested and will decide whether to increase city council member term limits from two four-year terms to three.
The council finalized the term limits measure for the April ballot at its meeting on Monday. Also at the meeting, the council increased the maximum amount of candidate campaign contributions from $100 to $250 and hired an ethics consultant to oversee the campaigning.
The placement of the term limits measure on the ballot received the most passionate response. Activist Rich Fox said it had at least the appearance of a power grab because Mayor Pro Tem Ken Kearsley and Councilmember Jeff Jennings will be termed out in 2008 under current city law. Later, while Kearsley was speaking, former Planning Commissioner Richard Carrigan yelled from the audience that Kearsley should remove himself from the issue. Carrigan said in a later interview that this could be done by amending the ballot proposal so it did not extend the term limits of the current council members. Kearsley did not respond and Carrigan stormed out of the room.
Carrigan said on Monday that he planned to campaign against the measure with “as much energy and money as I did against the Malibu Bay Co. Development Agreement.” Carrigan spent $24,000 on the successful campaign to reject the Malibu Bay agreement.
After the meeting, Kearsley said he had no comment regarding Carrigan’s outburst. During the meeting he said that Carrigan, Fox and activist John Mazza were hypocrites for speaking against term limits because they supported Walt Keller in the 2004 campaign. If he had won, Keller would have been elected to his third term. The current law did not prohibit him from running for a third term because his first two terms were before the law went into effect.
Malibu residents overwhelmingly approved term limits in 2000, with 65 percent of the voters favoring them. The law does not apply to those elected before 2000, so Kearsley and Jennings would be the first council members to be termed out.
Several council members said they were philosophically opposed to term limits, with Councilmember Sharon Barovsky saying it was undemocratic because a voter is prohibited from electing termed-out people. Jennings said term limits already exist with elections, because a person can choose not to vote for a person if there is a desire to remove the council member from office.
Councilmember Pamela Conley Ulich proposed last month to place the term limits question on the ballot. She said she was concerned the city could lose its institutional memory with the current law. On Monday, she and Jennings said they would favor asking the voters if they want to eliminate all term limits.
The council’s decision to increase campaign contributions had already been unofficially approved by the council last month. At Monday’s meeting, City Attorney Christi Hogin had proposed that the council also approve a feature in the new ordinance that would allow a private citizen to enforce the campaign finance laws through the court system. A majority of the council members declined to support the proposal because they said it would create increased litigation.
The council also on Monday night voted 4-1 to hire Robert Stern (no relation to Mayor Stern) from the Center for Government Studies to serve as the ethics consultant for the 2006 campaign. According to the staff report written by Hogin, Stern will conduct a workshop for candidates, their treasurers and the public. He will answer questions about the application of local laws and will investigate complaints about misconduct and recommend enforcement.
During the 2004 campaign, Xandra Kayden served in Stern’s role. With the help of a commission, she accepted complaints about ethical violations in campaign literature and newspaper advertisements. She then wrote opinions about whether the candidates had committed ethical violations. However, the candidates were not penalized regardless of her decision. Many of Kayden’s decisions were controversial and accusations were made that they were biased in favor of the incumbents.
Conley Ulich voted against hiring Stern because she said having a consultant in 2004 did not work well. Others said the process worked well and praised Stern as an ethical man.
Also at the meeting, several people associated with Trancas Riders and Ropers pleaded with the council to do something to get rid of the sheepherding classes that take place at the facility. The sheepherding classes had begun as an agreement between the company that runs them and Trancas Riders and Ropers.
The situation has fallen into conflict, with several people saying the dogs pose a danger to the horses and their riders. Jennings recommended the issue go before the Parks and Recreation Commission.