The City of Malibu has had six directors in less than 11 years. Some say complexity of dealing with planning issues is the root of the problem of the exodus.
By Jonathan Friedman/Special to The Malibu Times
After serving just 13 months as planning director, Drew Purvis has decided to step down. He will be opening his own planning consulting firm. This announcement comes in the wake of Rick Morgan’s, the public works director, sudden departure last week.
Purvis, who has been on the Malibu planning staff for nearly five years, became the department’s director in January of 2002. He replaced Barry Hogan who was moved out by the then city manager to work on special projects, after months of differences between him and the Planning Commission.
Purvis was the city’s sixth planning director. That is an alarming number, considering the city is just shy of its 12th birthday. So why is it that Malibu cannot hold onto its planning directors?
“That is the sixty-four dollar question,” Planning Commission Chair Richard Carrigan said. “I don’t have any particular answer, but it’s an extremely demanding job. Planning decisions quite frankly are the single most important issues in front of the city of Malibu.”
Purvis said he had always had the intention to open his own planning firm. The company will be called Drew Purvis Planning, and start off at his home as a three-person operation, with both employees coming from outside the city. He said he hopes with the firm’s success, it will soon move into an office. But two local architects say Purvis may be leaving his civic job for the private sector because of the many headaches associated with working on the Malibu planning staff.
Local architect Ed Niles said he believes one thing that is driving people away from the position is the Interim Zoning Ordinance (IZO) that the planning director must work with. He called the IZO a disaster that lacks clarity and contains too many contradictions.
“The IZO has been the root problem for 11 years,” he said. “”Imagine trying to turn out a paper, where the basic principles and guidelines are contradictory.”
Another architect, who asked not to be named, said he did not know if the difficulty of dealing with the IZO is the reason Purvis left, but the architect also said that the turnover rate has been due to a lack of clarity with what the intent of planning in Malibu is.
“Striving for more and more clarity [would help],” the architect said. “The original IZO was set up to be restrictive-slow growth, [the rules] they became standard, and it slows everything down.”
Carrigan said he agreed that some of the IZO is ambiguous and confusing. But he said addressing that is a front and center item on the Planning Commission and City Council’s agendas. During many of the coming meetings, the commission will be presented with zoning text amendments (ZTA).
“The ZTAs regarding the IZO will clarify it, streamline it and make it more effective,” Carrigan said.
The unnamed architect said another problem with the planning process is that there are too many people involved with it. He said this is especially true with the amount of public input that is considered by the commission and city staff.
“Everyone is involved in planning, starting with the public,” the architect said. “The city has given the general public, neighbors, a surprising amount of control on what happens with building and development.”
Carrigan said he emphatically disagrees with that opinion. He said that community input is a valuable asset for the Planning Commission and for the planning process.
“It might complicate their (the architects’) lives,” Carrigan said. “But from my perspective, I view it as a second staff to help our staff with community input. And they don’t even get paid for it.”
The unnamed architect said that a further problem for the planning staff is that it is asked not to treat every applicant the same. He said that there is pressure put on the city and staff, which makes the playing field uneven. He blamed a lot of this on applicants using well-connected expediters to help get their projects through.
“They have access to the system,” the architect said. “And depending on connections to staff and city government, it can have a negative affect to the process. It is more subjective, less objective.”
Carrigan said that is simply not the case. He said no favoritism is involved when deciding on which projects go through, and which ones are rejected.
Although Purvis will leave at the end of the month, he has agreed to continue working with the city on a consultant basis for a maximum of 15 hours a week. Lichtig said the final details of that are still being worked out. But she said that would be a way to take advantage of Purvis’ knowledge of the city code and his familiarity with the major ongoing projects, such as the Malibu Bay Company development agreement.
Editor Laura Tate contributed to this story.