Looking to win a second consecutive term on the council, 25-year Malibu resident Laura Rosenthal was first elected in 2010 to the council after serving as a Parks and Recreation Commissioner and Public Works Commissioner along with heavy involvement in the Malibu education community. She is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from USC and has been a clinical psychologist for 31 years. Rosenthal owns and manages her own granola company, Malibu Granola.
Why Laura Rosenthal? Why not take a chance on one of these new candidates?
The words that I use over and over are experience, leadership, relationship and results, and I have the experience…so the relationships that I’ve cultivated over the last four years and with my work, those two things have really led me to get results.
I’ve cultivated [relationships] with the officials at Caltrans, secretary of transportation in Sacramento, with the Coastal Commission, with our Assemblymember [Richard Bloom], with our Senator [Fran Pavley] with [County Supervisor] Zev Yaroslavsky and Zev’s office.
The $14 million in grant money [for Pacific Coast Highway projects] that the city got under my leadership is unprecedented for a city our size, and for Malibu.”
We’re [Malibu] almost 23 years old, we’re finally an adult, and we don’t want to go backwards to a lot of lawsuits, a lot of squabbling about not getting things done.
I know we will move forward and that we will be able to take care of the residents, and take care of our city, and take care of the environment if I’m re-elected.
Is the Civic Center turning into Rodeo Drive?
I can’t answer that specifically. Have a lot of higher end stores come? Yes. But that I think has to do with the soaring values of Malibu real estate … all of our houses are worth more money, so obviously commercial areas are going to be worth more money too. And so my goal is to control development, and one of the ways we can do that is through the Civic Center specific plan and the design guidelines.
By the way, I’ve never voted on any commercial development in four years. And I have never told anyone that I want to see [Rancho Malibu] Hotel built.
Did someone say you did?
There are people telling other people that during the campaign, that I am for the build-out of the entire Civic Center. And just to go back to development, I share the same concerns as I think all of Malibu does about whether it’s the hotel or the Civic Center, the commercial development, about traffic, about the massing, about the environmental impacts, all of those things. I share all of that and one of the great things about our city is that we have a very aggressive public input process and I never make up my mind about anything beforehand because I need to hear what public input is.
Pacific Coast Highway—if you could set one specific, achievable goal to improve safety on PCH in the next four years, what would that be?
The one thing that I think can be achievable is to lower our speed limit in our Civic Center area and more commercial areas, because we’ve been researching and working with the California Highway Patrol and with the sheriff’s [department] to try to find some laws that would specifically relate to commercial areas and reducing speeds.
I would like to see it reduced 10 miles per hour for both the 50 and the 45 [zones], so I’d like to see the 45 go down to 35 …That would really help because most of the accidents are speed related—not all. I think we have a special confluence of a bunch of different things, we have a bunch of tourists, we have a lot of people that are looking at the ocean or they’re looking to see if that particular house along the ocean is a celebrity’s house, and they don’t know the road and people are stopped or they don’t notice it and they’re looking all around.
Q: Why support an independent Malibu school district?
It’s another step of our gaining local control. I want our schools to reflect our community, not the community of Santa Monica. I love Santa Monica, I lived there, I have a lot of friends there, the people on the school board, I worked with all the educational leaders in Santa Monica for year. But our schools need to reflect us, and it’s very hard to get somebody elected [to the school board].
Does the school board struggle to understand the issues Malibu prioritizes?
Absolutely … we’ve had school board members come out here and get lost going to the high school because they didn’t know where it was. They don’t understand the struggles … let’s say we have with some of the emergency preparedness issues. They’ve never had a mudslide day in Santa Monica. They don’t understand some of the issues we deal with about retaining kids so that they don’t go to private schools and our struggle with our sports in the high school to really build it up so that there’s an outlet for the kids. They don’t understand our development rules and why all of those [Measure] BB projects are either finished or almost finished in Santa Monica and ours hasn’t begun.
To view a full transcript of each Malibu City Council candidate interview, see PDF attachment at left.