Critics say the possible purchase of the 20-acre property by the city will not alleviate the need for ball parks and other uses by the community.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
While City Council members and other civic leaders are racing to meet an end of the year deadline to raise enough money to buy the Chili Cook-Off site for use as a public park and wastewater / stormwater runoff treatment facility, some parks experts are questioning whether all the city’s eggs should be in that particular basket.
Several parks commissioners are criticizing the proposed $25 million purchase of the land, the largest undeveloped, flat parcel in the Civic Center area. Their questions about the Chili Cook-Off priority will be raised at this week’s Parks and Recreation Commission meeting.
“I’d really like to know what the city’s plans are for Chili Cook-Off,” said Parks Commissioner Madonna Slattery. “They are saying that this is a legacy park, I want to know what part of this is a legacy and what part is a park.”
“This is less about a park than it is about the environment,” said City Councilmember Sharon Barovsky.
Barovsky said the site is the only opportunity the city has to treat runoff water that is polluting Malibu Lagoon and the world-famous Surfrider Beach break.
City officials are in the midst of a fundraising drive to generate money that, along with regional clean water grants, will pay for the Chili Cook-Off site. If the park purchase falls through and the site is developed, as much as 110,000-square-feet of commercial development could be placed on the 20-acre property, which is named after the Labor Day carnival that occurs there annually.
Grants, including $2.5 million from the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission and $1.5 million from the Santa Monica College Measure S fund, are being supplemented by other government sources, and Malibu residents large and small are being urged to contribute to the fundraising effort.
But the parks commission hasn’t seen specific plans for the site, and some members are not convinced that it should be the city’s highest priority.
“It’s the dumbest idea for a park I have ever heard,” said parks Commissioner Doug O’Brien, who has been building Little League and other recreational facilities in Malibu for more than 30 years.
“It’s just going to be a ‘check-your-navel’ park bench in the middle of a drainage basin, when what we need are playing fields.”
Another commissioner, Dermot Stoker, said he was worried that the city has not addressed how it will pay to build the park once the land is acquired from billionaire developer Jerrold Perenchio’s Malibu Bay Company.
Parks commissioners note that opportunities to buy park sites at Trancas Creek, Point Dume and the Crummer property next to Bluffs Park have been rejected by the city, and that park sites at Trancas Canyon Road and Las Flores Canyon remain largely undeveloped.
“After all this talk, we still don’t have enough fields for baseball, soccer and other sports for the kids that are here, and we won’t after we buy Chili,” O’Brien said.
Slattery said she is disappointed that the city “never really jumped on” an opportunity to buy the Crummer property, a parcel of land that wraps around Bluffs Park that she said is a logical place to add badly needed sports fields.
But other parks advocates said the city couldn’t afford to miss the opportunity to buy the Chili site because of its pivotal role in reducing commercial development and traffic, cleaning Malibu Lagoon Surfrider Beach and providing a passive park-going experience.
“We have to look at the big picture and ask, what do we want Malibu to look like,” said Laura Rosenthal, a former parks commissioner who is campaigning for the Chili purchase. “We won’t get fields there, but we will get a nice central park that we can have community meetings or concerts at, where we can show movies without getting blasted by the wind, things like that.”
“I understand that everyone has their individual passions for different parks uses,” Barovsky said. “But people have to realize that the Chili site is not just a park, it is an environmental cleaning machine that is going to look like a park, feel like a park and be used like a park.”
Barovsky said the Chili site is pivotal to cleaning up Surfrider Beach.
“Every single council candidate since the city began has pledged to do something about that beach, and here is our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she said.
Council members noted that the Crummer site sold for $26 million, more than the Chili site will cost, and it would not be eligible for clean-water funds. Officials still hope the new owner of the Crummer property can be convinced to donate parkland in exchange for density concessions at that site. The parks and Chili Cook-Off purchase issues will be aired at this week’s Parks and Recreation Commission meeting at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, in the council chambers at Malibu City Hall, 23815 Stuart Ranch Rd.