ESPN recently reported that the NBA has paid Ozzie Silna and his brother, Dan, $100,000,000 for selling rights to a team called the Spirits of St. Louis. I commend Ozzie Silna for making so much money, but I hope he does not use it to drown out all other voices in our community during the current city election. Mr. Silna’s “Action Embroidery” contributed $40,000 of the $53,000 in political spending, reported by the CAN group last year.
With Mr. Silna’s wealth, comes the power to control elections and a duty to share the consequences of the policies he is campaigning for. Here is where CAN has a problem. Mr. Silna does not live in Malibu and will never be affected by the laws he lobbies so hard to impose on the rest of us. Mr. Silna lives in a mansion outside the city, but spent hours paired with Susan Jordan, the wife of Coastal Commissioner Pedro Nava, lobbying Coastal Commissioners to take the land away from half the residents in Malibu by mapping ESHA “no-use” areas and charging fees that would never be imposed on his family, his lawn, his pepper trees or his bank account.
So when Mr. Silna’s CAN group writes letters to the editor and takes out ads to try to make our council look bad, I question their motives. Last week’s letter from Kathy Sullivan, a CAN payee, is an example. She opposes the council™s decision to hire an independent election monitor. Is it because CAN, which got into trouble for not filing timely financial disclosures (see Malibu Times, 10/23/03) isn’t keen on being scrutinized?
CAN’s Ms. Sullivan also appears as the operative who collected candidate Jay Liebig’s 20 nomination signatures (even getting one woman to sign under two names) because Mr. Liebig has been living in New York for the last two years. Does Mr. Silna want to take over our City Council? Money can buy power over a lot of people which is obviously irresistible to some.
Anne Hoffman