City council candidates Andy Lyon and Hamish Patterson have ramped up pressure on city council incumbent Laura Rosenthal over the last few weeks, publishing email exchanges obtained via public records requests and criticizing her involvement in ongoing Malibu High School environmental issues.
Rosenthal says the publication of the exchanges constitute a smear campaign, a charge Lyon and Patterson refuted this week, saying Rosenthal’s words are being made available for the public to draw its own conclusions.
“It’s not the Malibu that I want to live in where people smear and misrepresent other candidates, because it puts a damper on quality people,” Rosenthal told The Malibu Times.
Lyon scoffed at claims of a smear campaign.
“That’s just her throwing it back on [our campaign.] She’s smearing us saying we’re smearing her. We’re not, we’re just getting it out there to show people what she has said. She has a record, and people need to see it,” he told The Malibu Times.
The other council incumbent, Lou La Monte, sided with Rosenthal and said the campaign has taken on an unprecedented negative tone.
“I don’t remember campaigns in Malibu being quite this bad. I remember we ran last time [in 2010] there were 10 candidates… everybody had different opinions, ideas, it never turned into anything nasty like that,” La Monte said. “The issues came out, which is really what elections are supposed to be all about.”
“Whatever you put out there on the public record is open to interpretation whether it’s good, bad or ugly,” Patterson countered.
One of the emails released is of April 2012 correspondence between then-Mayor Rosenthal and then-Malibu High principal Mark Kelly over the school’s athletic program, of which Rosenthal’s son was a part of at the time.
She urged Kelly to fire Malibu High athletic director Eric Neier and complained of a malfunctioning scoreboard, muddy sports fields and chaotic parking.
“Do you really think he does a good job or even an adequate job? I know that athletics isn’t very important to you or our district, but it is to a lot of kids and their families,” Rosenthal wrote. The email was sent from Rosenthal’s personal email account and includes a “Mayor, City of Malibu” signature line, which Patterson and Lyon believe was an abuse of her power as mayor.
When asked about the email, Rosenthal told The Malibu Times that the messages were taken “out of context.” She and Kelly often worked closely when it came to high school athletics, Rosenthal said.
Kelly affirmed Rosenthal’s side of the story.
“I would not have deemed that as a communication on behalf of the mayor and the city of malibu,” he told The Malibu Times. “I had that [type of communication] with her and other parents. I did deem that as a communication as a parent.”
At the time, Rosenthal’s younger son was a student at the high school.
Nonetheless, Patterson believes Rosenthal’s title could be portrayed as a representation of the city at the time.
“When it has the mayor’s official title on it, they’re both wrong,” he said.
Malibu High contamination
Rosenthal has also come under fire from opponents over allegations that she knew of toxic soils being discovered at the Malibu High/Middle School campus in 2010 and failed to act on the revelations.
At a council candidates forum on March 5, Rosenthal said she received a report on the contaminated soil in 2010 while she was a member of a Measure BB site committee, but was assured by district officials that all bases would be covered in alerting parents, teachers and students.
But shortly after the forum, she blamed a memory lapse and called it an incorrect admission.
“I didn’t correctly remember [during a recent candidates forum]…I was already off the BB advisory committee when they discussed the contamination issue,” Rosenthal said. She said she resigned from the committee in April 2010 to focus on her first city council campaign. The BB committee was first informed of the toxins in August 2010.
“She’s never owned it. She goes on to say she misspoke,” Patterson said. “She’s trying to split hairs. She knew exactly what was going on down there. It shows her utter incompetence.”
Later that year, the same report was presented on a Board of Education consent calendar but received no public comments.
“I fault myself for not asking more questions,” Rosenthal said. “…But none of us asked the questions. It was presented at school board meetings, it was presented at lots of other meetings.”
Nonetheless, Lyon encouraged voters to decide for themselves who to believe.
“It’s her records, it’s her words,” he said.
