There was a time when voters went to the polls to elect their governmental leaders, and the political battles of the days were fought out before those leaders, who ultimately had to publicly declare where they stood. If you didn’t like what your leaders did, you voted them out and brought in a new set of leaders. In America the ballot box ruled. That was then, this is now.
Today, if you don’t like what your leaders are doing, you don’t try for the ballot box. Instead, you call your lawyer. The courtroom in many instances is just politics in a different arena.
Currently, the Malibu Township Council (known as the MTC) is a community organization that is bitterly opposed to whatever the City Council does or contemplates doing. It doesn’t even appear to be related to any particular issue, but it’s more of a general mindset, which says if you, the council, are for it, we, the Malibu Township Council, are against it.
Actually, it’s not really that surprising since the ranks of the MTC are filled with frustrated wannabe leaders who just can’t quite get the voters to go along with them, so they have turned to the political court of last resort, the legal system.
Recently, they filed a lawsuit against the city alleging that the city had violated the Brown Act, which essentially says that public decisions must be made in public and not behind closed doors. The MTC wants the court to set aside the City Council’s decision to pursue negotiations for a possible Bluffs/Charmlee swap and make them start over, and judging from some of the language of the pleadings, if the court wanted to draw and quarter the City Council, that would also be all right with them.
So what is this great crime, this outrage, they think is being forced onto an unsuspecting Malibu electorate? They charge that some members of the City Council have been talking to Joe Edmiston and the Santa MonicaMountains Conservancy (known as the SMMC) about swapping the 532-acre Charmlee Park, which is owned by the city, for 83 acres of land up in Bluffs Park, owned by the SMMC. Those Bluffs Park acres might be used for ball fields, which the city needs. I say might because this is a potentially complicated deal. The State Attorney General’s office is involved, as well as the board of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the California Coastal Commission, the L.A. County Fire Department and probably an alphabet soup of other agencies I don’t yet know about.
Now I could understand the MTC’s angst if the city was going to turn Charmlee Park over to some developer who planned to build a bunch of condos, but that is simply not the case. I have had my differences of opinion with Joe Edmiston in the past, but I can absolutely assure you that Joe is not in the business of developing land; he’s in the business of holding raw land, in perpetuity for the public good. That’s his charge from the legislature and that’s also his personal mission.
It seems to me that the deal is a no brainer. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. What the City Council voted to do was to pursue negotiations with the SMMC and to do some fact-finding, which seems a very sensible way to proceed. Ultimately, the council will have to decide whether or not to go ahead with the deal. As they say, the devil is in the details, and any one of those multiple agencies could torpedo the deal by saying “no” or by adding conditions that make the deal unworkable. The only way to find out is to move forward.
What the MTC is trying to do is tie the council’s hands so they can’t move forward with the deal even if it turns out to be workable. Nobody elected the MTC, although they do claim to be representative of districts in Malibu. However, I’ve lived here since 1976 and have never received a letter inviting me to vote for my so-called local representative to the MTC, so I can only assume they represent no one but themselves.
I can only hope that the court exercises some common sense and deals with this petition as summarily as I believe it deserves.