I hope you don’t mind someone from the Valley giving a bit of perspective on your secession editorial. I generally enjoy reading The Malibu Times because I’d eventually like to move to your city, and I like keeping a wary eye on the odd controversy. Heck, the Malibu City Council is better than any soap.
I would guess your article comes out of frustration that the City of Malibu has not been everything you thought it would be, and I daresay you are right. Malibu was to a great extent ill-conceived, without the population needed to become a real city, one with actual control over its services. Any city that has to contract with the county for policing and other services surely loses many of the advantages of independence.
I would point to the rather obvious fact that Culver City is a better place than West Los Angeles, despite similar income levels; Beverly Hills is far better run than Bel Air; and so on. The reason is local control, and that requires a city capable of running, or at least controlling, all services.
To make this concrete, note the results of the recent election for Los Angeles Mayor. Steve Soboroff won the Valley; Antonio Villaraigosa won the central city, and the result is that we have James Hahn as a muddled compromise between the two regions. In other words, neither region got their preferred candidate, because the city is too diverse to gain consensus on the type of leader we really need.
I believe the Valley secession is to some extent absurd, simply because the resulting entity is still going to be much too big and unresponsive. But it would be enormously better than having our affairs run from Downtown LA, under a historically contemptuous and unresponsive City Council.
I would be curious to hear your perspective on the actual results of Malibu secession in more detail; perhaps you could point me to an earlier editorial that covers it?
Many thanks for your publication on the web; I enjoy and appreciate it.
David Dennis
Woodland Hills, CA