Will our Malibu as a fabled address somehow survive as a livable community with a sense of place and not just a trough for real estate interests and a bloated bureaucracy?
Will hope for Malibu’s noble mission statement to maintain its unique rural character prevail over its history of poorly planned development and an undiscerning, self-aggrandizing local leadership?
Will Malibu’s residents, still reeling from the Woolsey disaster and its unapologetic mismanaged aftereffects, ever get the requisite transparency and accountability required for good governance?
These I feel are the critical questions facing the new City Council being inaugurated at the upcoming on-line meeting featuring the swearing in of the three recently elected members. Good luck to them and us.
Despite the reverberating public posturing in and about City Hall, there is a hope that when the new council is seated and wily city manager Reva Feldman stops her conniving, the pressing business how better to serve Malibu residents will be addressed.
Yes, the residents who have long battled to preserve what is special about Malibu, instead of the well-connected and deep-pocketed, along with the sinecurists at City Hall, who have tenaciously clung to their malpractices, hiding behind a baleful status quo.
That albeit measured hope was expressed in the recent election in which two avowed reform candidates promising change at City Hall, Bruce Lee Silverstein and Steve Uhring, garnered the most votes. Those votes and the continued echoing of civic complaints have to concern incumbents Karen Farrer and Mikke Pierson.
Appealing to their professed long affection for Malibu, we can only wish they join in concert with Silverstein and Uhring, and maybe even include realtor Paul Grisanti, if he can tamper his personal rapacity as he presumes public office.
This welcomed concordat could begin with initiating an empowered task force to examine the municipal malfeasance rumored to be rife at City Hall, uncovering whatever and also possibly putting it to rest. Time at long last for transparency and accountability.
Certainly, the considered Pierson, cautious Farrer and neophyte Grisanti would embrace that, which frankly also could answer the surreptitious speculation that they are being manipulated by a wily Reva, for current vanities and possible future rewards.
In the launching of a new council, its members should be reminded of something the statesman Daniel Webster once said, that government was made by the people, for the people, and will be answerable to the people, nationally, to be sure, but also locally, in small towns, like Malibu, we hope.
Sam Hall Kaplan