As Mr. York points out in his article “Round 3: City Council,” the Council has studied the Retail Ordinance to death for over three years. Then they chose to stall the Your Malibu, Your Decision petition signed by Malibu citizens who are totally exasperated with their evasive tactics. The recent about-face to put the petition back on the agenda was actually in response to a court order, not the displeasure of their constituents.
The Council can hurry up and do something when it suits them. For example, the Civic Center wastewater treatment facility: the city already has story poles and the public comment period is almost over on their draft EIR. Such a timeline is unprecedented. They are misinforming the residents of Malibu by pointing to the so-called “ban on septic systems” by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board (LAWQCB). In fact, the LAWQCB did not ban onsite wastewater disposal systems (OWD), they banned “discharges from septic systems” per page one of said ban. The City of Malibu repeats this misstatement of facts on the city website and city memorandum of understanding (MOU). To quote the summary statement of the ban as printed on the State of California website: “The prohibition applies to all dischargers in the Civic Center area, including commercial and industrial facilities, public facilities, and residences. New septic discharges are no longer allowed.”
The fact is that the costs, which homeowners will bear for a compulsory connection to a sewer, will far exceed the cost to upgrade their OWD to a new zero-discharge system. The residents will suffer more than the cost of a sewer in the form of hours spent in gridlock traffic, outages due to overburdened infrastructure and costly public works projects to accommodate this rampant commercial growth that we the people of Malibu don’t want.
So what’s in a name anyway? Plenty of obfuscation. The so-called “septic ban” should be renamed to “septic discharge ban” immediately. The MOU should be corrected as well.
Marilyn Dove