So now we’ve been reduced to digging up trash about the mayor’s traffic tickets and DMV record? Wow, and I thought the last campaign attack video and accompanying newspaper advertising by the local Wetlands Action Network/Sierra Club (aka Marcia Hanscom) lying about the proposed development agreement was pretty darn low. So let me ask Sam Hall Kaplan, Marcia Hanscom, Carolyn Van Horn and their 20 hardcore groupies what’s next? Joan House’s income tax returns? Jeff Jennings college transcripts? Ken Kearsley’s medical records?
When everyone was screaming a few years back about the city’s permitting process, it was Tom Hasse who first proposed and pushed through permit streamlining. When no one else would move to follow up on the City Council’s 1992 pledge in support of a two-term limit on councilmembers, it was Tom Hasse who authored the ballot measure, brought it to the council, persuaded two colleagues (House and Barovsky) to place it on the ballot and campaigned for it. It won with over 64 percent of the vote. And when, after 10 years of fighting, the Malibu Bay Company was proposing to develop their properties with NO public amenities by simply following the General Plan and IZO, it was Tom Hasse, working with Joan House, who spent a year negotiating a development agreement that will give we, the people, a 19-acre park with three sports fields and a community center at Point Dume, another 26 acres of MBC property permanently deed-restricted as open space and a 10-year moratorium on the MBC developing another 20 acres including the Chili Cook-off site. That’s 65 out of MBC’s 93 vacant acres.
F/X, lies and videotapes can’t change these facts. Neither can skullduggery masquerading as objective journalism. That’s why I’ll take a Tom Hasse with seven vehicle code violations to run our city government over the holier-than-thou morality police of Kaplan, Hanscom and Van Horn. And after the dozens of phone calls I’ve received outraged over this very personal attack, so will Malibu. If this small band of 20 people can’t stop the development agreement arguing on the merits, then maybe (hello?) it’s because it’s a solution the majority of Malibu accepts.
Sherman Baylin