Imagine that Walt Disney and Lew Wasserman were considering improving the project called the Malibu Lagoon project. They say it’s germ infested.
They’re two of the most inventive Americans, who’ve both created successful privately owned communities in Southern California and elsewhere. How do you think these responsible proprietors might analyze it? Certainly not as a tax-and-spend bureaucratic job protecting bureaucrats, but as two win-win entrepreneurs where everybody benefits. They’d start with research, consulting, find out how it’s used and how many people visit. They’d go to surveyors, riparian and soil experts, engineers, a team of land development specialists. A first hire would be a legendary geologist, and he’d tell them, “There ain’t no lagoon, this is just the outflow end of a long mountain creek, and every ten to fifteen years, it floods like crazy and washes all the stopped up debris out to sea. You can’t waste millions giving this a fancy dress up. It’ll be gone !” So, being profit-seeking entrepreneurs, they would realize that mass flooding is the first thing to deal with and Lew and Walt would come up with the idea of creating a water re-circulating flood as an attraction, a way to improve and keep clean a more natural lagoon they will actually re-shape. With the help of both companies’ superb engineering staffs, they can also build in, and prepare for any big floods that actually happen in the future.
Coming back to reality, the simple truth is it’s a creek bed pouring out into the endless depths of the ocean. Keep it simple, keep it like it is, avoid more government taxed scams, avoid the increase of recurring liabilities that are sure to proliferate once phony, make-work government projects are started. When there are heavy rains, and when it floods hike back into the canyon a half a mile or more, it’s gorgeous, like being in the northwest, and like the Kern River out of Bakersfield. Thrilling! It needs nothing!!
The whole idea of messing with Malibu Creek is as silly, reckless and almost as dangerous (but not quite) as Parkmeister “Pyro Joe” Edmiston’s crazed nightmare project of permitting campfires in heavily wooded hillside fire areas, right near communities of lovely homes. I think he had heavy drinkers and wild, late night parties in mind. Proprietary management is the direction to take, and the least done against nature, is the rule. It is simple, no matter how many people want to get their hands into it, spend millions, it’s a vast state-driven public conspiracy against the real world.
Peter Fleming