From the PublisherArnold G. York
Something is terribly wrong at Malibu City Hall. People keep leaving. Last week it was acting Public Works Director Rick Morgan. This week it’s Planning Director Drew Purvis. There is a constant churn of top personnel, particularly in the Planning Department. Think back. There was Bob Bennard, Vince Bertoni, Craig Ewing, Joyce Parker, Barry Hogan and now Drew Purvis, and I suspect I’m forgetting one or two others. We’re not only losing them at the top. Other cities are recruiting away Malibu’s other experienced people, so the question is, what’s going on?
We started asking around. Our editor Laura Tate, writer Jonathan Friedman and myself talked to a number of people, including some who didn’t want to be identified and would only talk on background. We’ve talked to city people, architects, contractors, engineers, expediters, builders and people who have gone through the planning process and then we compared notes.
We asked them what’s going on and what do they think is the problem? There is only one thing on which they all seem to agree and that is that the planning process is complicated, very expensive, very slow, and considerably more difficult than in other places and has about it an enormous uncertainty.
The next obvious question was why? The answers came in many different forms so I’ll try to reduce it down to their essence.
There appeared to be widespread feeling that the Interim Zoning Ordinance was a significant element of the problem. Malibu has written a set of rules governing building and renovation that simply don’t work. Some believe earlier city councils originally put them in place purely and simply because they wanted to stop any further development, and they did it by making the process overly complicated and arbitrary. There is also a feeling that many rules were put into place with 1-acre lots in West Malibu in mind, and when you apply them to older, smaller lots in other parts of the city, particularly on the hillsides, it’s virtually impossible to build without a variance, which is one of the reasons that everything seems to head back to the Planning Commission.
There appears to be agreement that the planning director is in a terrible dilemma. He or she has to take a set of rules that don’t work, or in some instances barely work, and must try to make a decision knowing full well that you can’t tell people with a legal lot that they cannot build. Most of the easy decisions and the easy lots have long since been built on. We’re probably down to the last 20 percent or so and, to one degree or another, those are difficult lots. People obviously built on the easy lots first, but now we’re dealing with some more difficult decisions. We also have created all sorts of guidelines that don’t always make sense. A smart creative planning director could solve some of those problems. However, in Malibu it doesn’t end there. Whoever doesn’t like a decision that’s been made invariably files an appeal. It’s either the applicant, or the next-door neighbor, or the Sierra Club, or the Slow/Fast Growth Movement, or the ‘We Don’t Want Anything Here Contingent,’ and it invariably ends up in front of the council. Then, no matter what the decision- this being an affluent community, probably one of the few in the world that has florist lawyers, editor lawyers, PTA mom lawyers, and where just about everyone’s third kid is a lawyer- you can guess where every decision ultimately ends up.
Unlike some people, I don’t think it’s a personnel problem because I’ve seen the same problems recur over the years with many different planning directors, of various levels of skill. Nor do I think that this is a management problem, where someone is just a bad manager, because I’ve seen too many city managers and planning directors run into the same management problems.
It reduces to some simple problems.
- The workload in planning is enormous and overwhelming and we keep adding to it.
- The system is too complex. We’re trying to control too much. We simply have too many rules, which are calculated to create conflict.
- Too many things are discretionary; it’s almost impossible to tell what the laws entitle you to.
- Unfortunately the system responds only to squeaking wheels, which encourages more squeaking.
Although the problems appear simple, the solutions are not. I don’t think we should plunge into trying to solve the problem. They’ve been here since the inception of the city and haven’t gone away. When private industry has a problem it brings in a knowledgeable consultant from the outside, like McKinsey and Company. I’m sure there are consultants that do this for cities, and Malibu needs some objective analysis, quickly. Hell, we could even hire all our old planning directors to consult, sit them at a table and ask them, what’s wrong? What do we keep and what do we throw out? But no matter how good the analysis, we, the people of Malibu and our elected leaders, have to recognize we have a problem and changes are needed. Our original ordinances weren’t given to us on stone tablets. Councils, usually on the fly, created them, and some clearly don’t work and have to be changed.
If we’re contemplating change, all the stakeholders have to be at the table, otherwise it’s a recipe for failure. This is more than a simple administrative problem to be solved in the city manager’s office. Perhaps it’s time for another community vision conference. It’s been 12 years and it’s high time we reexamined some of our old decisions, keep what’s good and throw out what’s bad.