An ebullient Malibu City Council came bouncing out of Monday night’s council meeting after taking only 90 minutes to unanimously adopt a budget, which for this town, is historic.
But the devil may be in the details. It’s typically easy to do the budget job after a good revenue year–and this has been a good year because it’s based on last year’s revenues and wonderful weather. The next year may not be quite as bright as the economy slows or the weather cycle turns.
Next time, if the economy heads down and the tax revenues drop, the city may have to make some hard choices, and there may be some big ones on the horizon.
A community center is probably going to set us back $5 million plus for the building alone, unless we make a deal, and then you add in the cost of the land. The city hall will probably cost easily that much plus the cost of the land. We need a slew of ball fields, which means we have to buy or trade for the land and build and maintain the fields. And there’s some momentum building for the city to help bail out the schools.
The City of Santa Monica, which has roughly 80 percent of the students in our district, puts in $3 million to the schools. If Malibu puts in an equivalent amount, the city’s share would be $750,000. But Malibu has only put in a fraction of that, and I’ve heard grumbling from our neighbors in Santa Monica about what they view as our rather puny contribution.
I’ve even heard talk of a local education initiative here in Malibu to set aside a certain percentage of the annual budget for the schools. San Francisco does it, so why not us? There is an open space/wetlands/animal rights contingent, which also wants a chunk of the money.
These kinds of demands are not unusual. Malibu is maturing as a city and its demographics are changing, with more children, and it now has municipal needs.
On the other side of the ledger, the city is just beginning to look at how it spends its dollars. Some institutions, which receive city subsidies, may come under closer scrutiny, especially ones with major expense items like the sheriff’s budget.
Residents can look forward to a bunch of claims against what may be a diminishing pot of dollars in the near future and some knock down battles over what could be a scarcity unless the city is willing to make deals, pass bonds, allow commercial revenue generators–like hotels or B&Bs–or find lots of grant money or a combination of all of the above.
So I guess it’s OK for the council members to pat themselves on the back, but I wouldn’t get too comfortable if I were them.
The Civic Center guidelines
Several years ago a previous council appointed a blue ribbon committee to design a master plan for the Civic Center area. Some very good people spent a couple of years, endless meetings, and several hundred thousand dollars on consultants’ time to design what is called a Civic Center specific plan. They ceremoniously delivered it to the council and the council did what councils usually do with those kinds of blue ribbon reports–they put it on the shelf and promptly forget about it.
Well now, there are a bunch of separate developers who have come to the city, each with plans for their piece of the Civic Center. The city can only stall for so long, but, ultimately, it has to decide something.
City staff, at the behest of the council, said, “This is crazy and chaotic and we need some rules.” The idea was to give developers a general idea of what the city wanted, or at least would accept, so the Civic Center would have some sort of overall plan or look. The problem is that some people have a totally different idea of what they want for the Civic Center. Some want to see the Civic Center underwater, so they figure that any planning will move it toward development, which they oppose pretty much in its entirety. So they’re doing everything they can to thwart any serious planning in hopes they can make it a hot political issue and elect a new council that will then use public monies to oppose everything.
The council has sent the hot potato–the guidelines–back to the land-use subcommittee of Jeff Jennings and Joan House with instructions, I believe, to perform a miracle that makes everyone happy. It isn’t going to happen. So, ultimately, we the voters are going to have to decide if we want to dig in and try and avoid all Civic Center development, or if we want to work out a compromise.
The danger, of course, is that if we can’t agree on a compromise, it’s all going to court.
And, ultimately, a judge is going to get to design our Civic Center, just the way the Coastal Commission is drawing up our Local Coastal Plan.