Both local papers were against moving city council meetings to Tuesday nights, when they go to print.
By Olivia Damavandi / Assistant Editor
After protests from local newspapers and city activists, the Malibu City Council at its regular Monday night meeting voted 3-2 against a proposed ordinance to move its meetings to Tuesday nights.
The ordinance was heavily opposed by various residents, including the publishers of local newspapers The Malibu Times and Malibu Surfside News, both of which go to print on Tuesday nights. They argued that it would hinder timely news coverage, and some accused the council of using the ordinance to delay coverage of weekly news that could result in unfavorable public opinion.
“The Malibu Times … is the only source of neutral local information available to the public,” Times writer and former assistant editor Jonathan Friedman told the council. “The city has its press releases. Community activists, and, sometimes, council members themselves, send e-mails around the city or distribute flyers. These are good ways to get people’s juices flowing. But nobody could say with a straight face that these are examples of neutral information flowing through the city.”
Sam Hall Kaplan, chair of the city’s View Protection Task Force, warned council members that their approval of the ordinance would be “seen as a way of discouraging public debate. The council is always already under suspicion for trying to manipulate the news.”
City officials claimed that holding regular meetings on Tuesdays rather than Mondays would allow staff an additional business day to prepare for council meetings and provide the public additional time to contact staff or council members to discuss agenda items. The city states it is understaffed on Fridays because staff members have the option of working overtime during the week and taking Mondays or Fridays off.
“The proof is in the pudding in regard to whether Tuesday night works instead of Monday night,” Vic Peterson, the city’s community development director, told the council. “The Mondays before council meetings can be very chaotic. It’s a thing people do here in Malibu-send letters and comments in just before the meeting. We have families, we have things we’d like to do over the weekends.”
Both Peterson and the city’s Assistant City Manager Reva Feldman explained the difficulty for city staff to respond to public comments submitted over the weekends in time for the Monday night council meetings. City Manager Jim Thorsen said the city receives an average of 10 correspondences during the weekend, and that he felt Monday night meetings are always “rushed.”
The question came down to a matter of what was more important: timely public news or a schedule change that claimed to make city staff more efficient.
Mayor Andy Stern and Mayor Pro Tem Sharon Barovsky supported a more efficient staff, Councilmembers Pamela Conley Ulich and Jefferson Wagner supported timely news, and Councilmember John Sibert said he would not support the ordinance “if it were to see that someone could run for city council.”
“Obviously the idea of having a newspaper informing the public is paramount over staff issues. Anything that stimulates the public to get involved should not be discouraged,” Kaplan said. “The ideas that stories would be missed would be unfortunate, I would almost say criminal, considering what’s happening.”
Barovsky denied rumors printed in the Surfside News she said implied that she favored the ordinance to support 2001 Malibu Mayor Joan House, who is rumored to run in the upcoming city council election but cannot attend Monday night meetings.
“I don’t mind waiting for next council to make this decision…but I was elected to provide the best services for city,” Barovsky said. “If that’s making staff more responsive to residents, it seems to me that bears an equal weight in this age than making it easier for the press to stay up and write an extra story.
“These meetings are televised live, replayed all week long, can be Tivo-ed, and a lot of Facebook has been taken from some of our meetings,” Barovsky continued. “We get Twitter and jitter and all the things that never were possible when we became a city. Now we can send everything electronically. The question is what’s important. Is helping staff more important than getting ads on Thursday?”
“Life is hard and we all have to work, and I have to read these things on the weekend and it’s not fun,” Conley Ulich said at the meeting. “I feel at this time it’s uncomfortable for me to support it. I would hate for this to be a debate in the elections instead of what’s going on in Malibu.”