I had a friend who is now deceased
Took bags full of vitamins
Then increased
To popping incessantly morning to night
Who bragged of his vigor
His health and his might
And when I was sniffling he was so bold
As to boast that he never caught a cold
Then he gulped some more down
And started to choke
Before I could help him
The poor fellow croaked!
Geraldine Forer Spagnoli
A preliminary 4th quarter fiscal report for the City of Malibu indicated the various city departments’ activities appear to be on target for the most part. Though the city has undergone changes with staff and elected officials, overall, the matters to which they tend have not been affected drastically.
As of May 31, 2000, the city received $11,134,473, equaling 90.45 percent of its budgeted expectations. They also received an extra $1,766,552 from special revenue funds, which include gas tax funds, transportation development act, landslide maintenance district and more.
According to the report, expenditures for the 11 months period are also in line with appropriations. During the quarterly meeting, the City Council was briefed by each department and informed about the status of all the projects each department is involved with, item by item.
Law enforcement services, code enforcement services, animal control services and disaster preparedness cost $3,507.273. These figures showsa differential of about 20 percent less than the $4,353,206 budgeted for the entire year.
Vehicle impound revenues were about half of what the city had expected. Visitors and residents alike have been spared from the predicament of having their vehicles towed and all the while the city is still in good financial health.
The city earned $170,719 from parking citations and processes. Property tax income exceeded expectations by $134,382, since the actual earnings of $2,434,382 and $2,300,000 were budgeted. However, deregulation decreased the utility users tax income since it was implemented in 1999.
Seeing that the Parks and Recreation Department has spent less than the amount budgeted, Paul Adams, Parks and Recreations director, said in his report to the council that vacancies in the department staff have made promoting and implementing programs at the that they had originally planned impossible.
“We are currently starting a third recruitment cycle to fill our open recreation supervisor position,” said Adams.
When the department director, Catherine Walter, left in December, the position was left open for two months until Adams was appointed.
“The result has been a savings, primarily in salaries, of some of the expected operating costs,” he said. “The downside is that our enrollments have also been down, which has resulted in lower revenues and lower program expenses.
“There are many needs in this community that I hope my department can help to fill,” said Adams, adding that the department is confident they will have continued growth in both the number of participants and in the number of services provided.
However, it takes experienced staff to implement good quality programs and to help the public get involved.
“Our vacancies this past year have created a challenge for us, but we look forward to getting back on track once our vacancy is filled,” said Adams.
Public Works services also ran below budgeted numbers. So far, 55.66 percent of the $2,321,602 budgeted was spent on street maintenance, sidewalk and trail maintenance, traffic control, flood control and storm damage, median and parkway maintenance, parks and open space maintenance, and general engineering.
Chuck Bergson, Public Works director, said that as of July 31, the department ran on budget, because the figures indicated in the quarterly report did not show the purchase orders, that have been issued since then.
These purchase orders include sidewalk and street maintenance for Morning View Drive and Gernsey Avenue, the paving of Corral Canyon, flood works and repairs in other area, and more.
Ed Lippman, city treasurer, said this was only a preliminary report and a full quarterly account, expected to be ready by mid-August, will show the final numbers more accurately.
Kimmy is 10. She’s handicapped. She’s my granddaughter.
I can’t get her in or out of a car without the extra width of a handicapped parking space. I applaud and appreciate the efforts of parking officers who attempt to keep the spaces inviolate, even by people who borrow them only for a “few seconds” or when they’re in a pinch.
Anyone who violates the spaces, under whatever circumstances, sends a message that it’s okay. Or that it’s cool to fudge and get away with it–the UCLA athletes. The spaces often appear to be under-used, but in truth, about 50 percent of the time, they’ re full, often with cars where no “handicapped” card hangs from the rear-view mirrors. The problem isn’t how long an invalid user is in the space, but the lack of respect for what the spaces are all about. In these harsh and graceless times, they represent enlightened civility
I guarantee, spend one week with a handicapped person and you’ll never misuse their parking spaces again.
Jean Craig
(The following letter was sent to the Water Quality Control Board members.)
I read recently in the July 6 issue of the Malibu Surfside News that you are considering a request from Pepperdine University to discharge effluent into Marie Canyon during “emergency” conditions. I implore you to deny this request, and in fact find it amazing that it would even merit consideration.
As you well know, Malibu is already troubled with pollution, due in large part to actions taken elsewhere, i.e., the Tapia Sewage Treatment Plant discharging “treated effluent” into Malibu Creek, where it proceeds to contaminate Surfrider Beach. This Pepperdine request is to support expansion of their facilities, and the answer should be evident – if their facilities are insufficient to handle the expansion, the expansion must be postponed until the facilities are expanded to match.
To authorize Pepperdine to discharge effluent into Marie Canyon would be dereliction of duty for a Water Quality Control Board. Marie Canyon is not some remote, wilderness area. It is immediately adjacent to the Pepperdine campus, in the watershed of the Santa Monica Mountains that drains directly across Pacific Coast Highway and onto Malibu Beach along Old Malibu Road. Absolutely intolerable.
Beyond the fundamental issue, Pepperdine has long shown a disregard for the well being of Malibu. Although they desired to “be in” Malibu, they deliberately sought to be outside the city. Malibuans know that these “emergency” conditions would become routine, and we would be stuck with pollution, with the polluter given relief from the laws that the rest of the community is forced to live with, and for our own well being are attempting to enhance.
Please deny this request to allow Pepperdine University to dump their effluent in Marie Canyon, or anywhere else in Malibu, under any conditions.
Erwin E. Schulze, Jr.
Wallace A. Wyss/Special to The Malibu Times
Most surfers look at a comrade riding a 5-foot wave and say “good wave.”
Jefferson Wagner looks and wonders what changes he needs to make to his latest surfboard design in order to allow a surfer to take a ride on that same wave better.
Wagner has gone by the moniker “Zuma Jay” since high school days when he would drive his VW bus over the hill from Agoura to the glistening curlers of the Malibu coast. Now he lives in a 4,300 sq. foot Scott Hailley-built house overlooking that same stretch of coast.
Born in Palm Springs in the 50s, back when air conditioning was a luxury, he appreciates the cool breezes of Malibu. He moved to Hidden Hills in 1960 with his parents and became an outstanding athlete in track, in the mile, the 2-mile and cross country, winning a varsity letter in each sport.
Wagner followed his high school career with a four year pre-law course at the University of the Pacific, in Stockton, far from the nearest beach. He returned to Southern California and settled in Malibu after graduation, intent on law school.
He never became a lawyer. Instead he decided to start a business, deciding that law school would have to wait.
It’s still waiting.
Wagner had discovered that he could make a product that was in high demand: surfboards. On a shoestring, he set up a surf shop and began making boards while saving money by living in the back of his shop.
“In 1967, I came into the sport when wooden boards were dying out and foam boards were becoming popular, so my business became shaping quality foam boards.”
Eventually having a board by Zuma Jay was “the in thing” among surfers, like driving a woodie wagon, or wearing flip-flops. In ’78 he moved from his first shop, which had been nothing more than a tin hut at “Free Zuma,” to the location in mid-Malibu on Pacific Coast Highway that he has occupied to this day. He continued to innovate in the sport. One of the big revolutions in surfboard design was the switch from one fin to three fins.
“I find the three fins make a better ‘pivot spot,’ says Zuma Jay, the theory being that the three fins dig in better and allow the surfer to turn sharper.
He was already a board maker when the whole trend of painting pictures on boards with an airbrush came along.
“That’s gone away now,” he laments.
He still saves some of his early boards, the ones with unique materials such as a concourse balsa wood model so beautifully finished that it is one of only two he keeps at his hilltop house.
Ironically, Zuma Jay sells surfboards not only to cognoscenti, but to a few people who don’t surf but want to display them as a souvenir of Malibu.
“It costs $135 to ship one to Paris by air,” he says.
He knows the prices for shipping to several other world capitals, as it happens often enough. Surf shops around the world carry his boards, especially in Japan, where there dwells a pocket of Zuma Jay enthusiasts.
Does Zuma Jay still surf himself?
“My girlfriend and I hit the surf or boogie board every day if we can,” says Wagner. “My daughter, Ava, 8, is also a surfer and is into kayaking as well.”
In all his years of surfing, Zuma Jay has only had one injury. No–not being hit by a board. No–he never crashed into the rocks. It was a run-in with a cute little sea otter that he remembers.
“The sea otters were using our surfboards as handy platforms to break open shells,” he says. “I kept shooing one away and he got nasty and bit me in the gluteus maximus.”
Zuma Jay credits his daily surfing with the fact that he still weighs the same as when he started college.
“Surfing is as good an exercise as any other,” he says.
He does have one other sport, though–pick-up basketball. You can often find him over at the “Firestone Fieldhouse” trying to sink a J-hook from half-court to show the college lads how the “old-timers” do it.
He hasn’t had time to travel to surf in recent years, but waxes eloquent about his earlier days, when he and his buddies would take the old VW bus down the Baja coast to their secret beaches. Now, 30 years later, he can reveal their names–places like “Nine Palms,” “Shipwrecks” and “Zippers.”
“Everybody’s discovered them now,” he says with a chuckle.
He also surfed around the Pacific, including Fiji and Hawaii–both “dream” locations for a one-time “Val” surfer (“Val” is a surfer from the valley).
Unlike other surfboard makers, he hasn’t been tempted to go into clothing with a full line.
“I stock shirts and shorts with my logo,” he says, “and that’s about it. I run a ‘purist’ shop for real surfers.”
In fact, he once had two stores, but sold the other to concentrate on the one in Malibu, where he makes his home. Ironically, a British surf shop was so taken with the cachet of his name that they have licensed the use of the name “Zuma Jay” for their shop.
Today, Zuma Jay has a dozen employees in his shop, some from Malibu High and others are Pepperdiners.
With his hilltop home, with its de rigeur pool and tennis courts, overlooking the Pacific, it appears Zuma Jay has made it, but he still reports in at the shop seven days a week, and has taken only one vacation in the last seven years.
“I don’t really make money with the shop,” he says, “it breaks even.”
Zuma Jay has made his money from posing as model for a controversial product banned in many indoor establishments.
“Marlboro,” he says, “I was a Marlboro man for five years. That job bought that house.”
Asked about the contrasting figure of an environmentally conscious surfer and smoking, he smiles, and suddenly you see that familiar smile once reflected from a thousand billboards.
“If I didn’t do it, somebody else would have,” he says.
He has always been a non-smoker.
To help with living cost, Zuma Jay has another sideline of work.
“I’ve got a second job,” he says, pulling out a resume with a few film credits, more than 200 at last count.
A good many of the credits are as a stunt man–falling, jumping through windows, karate (he is a black belt) or driving in a way judged too daring for the principals. If that weren’t enough, there’s a job within a job in Hollywood–Zuma Jay is known as a man who can make things go bang.
“I’m a licensed pyrotechnic expert,” he says, describing the difference between a “Hollywood” explosion and a real one. The “Hollywood” one, he explains, is flashier, with lots of yellow and red for the camera.
Zuma Jay is sort of a celebrity in Malibu, though many who visit his surf shop don’t know his real name. His girlfriend, Candace Brown, a video editor who edits videos for rock groups and film-makers, laments that, whenever they get a chance to go out for a quiet dinner, he is inevitably recognized by local surfers who approach and want to talk surf.
“But it’s not all bad,” says Zuma Jay. “I’ve also gotten acting jobs from people I bumped into here and there in Malibu.”
Ironically, he doesn’t always recognize celebs himself. Brown tells the story of the time a New Jersey native came into the shop, explained that he was an east coast surfer, and asked about what kind of board was good for him. Zuma Jay took half an hour to discuss the man’s surfing style and board requirements and when the time came to buy, and the customer’s credit card hit the counter, Zuma Jay found out that he was talking to a world famous rock musician Bruce Springsteen.
“And I’m the guy who won a Grammy for ‘the best special effects’ in a rock video,” he jokes.
Overheard: two men talking about the development agreement. One said he can’t wait until they build the mall and theaters here so his son will have something to do.
Me yelling inside my head: “Hey you idiot–we have two theaters already. You live at the beach, for gosh sakes–other kids would give their nintendos up for that, or have him volunteer with the seniors or the wildlife center, or make him take up a new hobby like stamp collecting or skateboarding, or–what a concept–play with him yourself. Take him to Agoura, a mere 20 minutes from here and dump him there instead of dumping him at a Malibu mall.
Susan Tellem
I am not a “Malibu mom,” but if I were, I would be offended by the comments made by Cindy Vandor in your recent article reporting her arrest.
Her actions in the matter should sadden and educate moms everywhere. Using her community name and vehicle make as some sort of threat of retaliation toward law enforcement is pathetic. Is there something about Malibu that we don’t know.
I would have thought being in journalism and an educator that Mrs. Vandor’s mind would be a tad bit more open. She made a bad choice and had difficulty accepting it. Would a few more steps from a general parking space been so difficult? Lesson #1 – don’t set examples for your children that it’s okay to take short cuts. Then she made the matter considerably worse by thinking she had some kind of “special clout” to take the officer out of her ticket. When that didn’t work, she taught her son it’s okay to throw a tantrum when things don’t go his way.
Sometimes life isn’t exactly fair, and maybe it was a little “petty” of the officer to write her up, she wasn’t exactly hurting anyone, right? Lesson #2 – don’t teach your kids it’s okay to cheat “a little” and try to justify it when you get caught. Imagine just for a moment a couple of scenarios. “I wasn’t really cheating on my exam. I was just looking at my classmate’s test paper.” Or, “I wasn’t really drinking and driving, I just drank one beer after school.” Or, “I wasn’t really going to steal that candy bar, I was just seeing if it fit into my backpack.” If she really thought about it, I’m sure Ms. Vandor would see the correlation.
The really sad part is that Mrs. Vandor is teaching her son these lessons, and he’s listening. Your article quoted her son as saying “everybody in the shopping center didn’t agree with the officers.” Mrs. Vandor has missed the point, and now her son has, too. As an outsider, I think it’s pretty clear that the situation was not about inappropriate behavior of the officers, but her unwillingness to accept her mistake and take the consequences. Learning the consequences of negative behavior is a very crucial aspect of preparing children for responsible adulthood.
I hope Mrs. Vandor will teach her son and her community another lesson by forgetting the high-powered attorney she will undoubtedly hire and drop her complaint against the officers.
I think all of us would like to be reminded that it’s fairly human to be wrong occasionally, as long as you accept the consequences, learn your lesson. . . and don’t keep making the same mistakes over and over.
Gloria Hao
Re: “To Protect and Serve. . .Tickets?” (Letters to the editor, July 27, 2000)
I find it ironic that what appears to be entirely inappropriate behavior on the part of a one Ms. Vandor is being defended by a person whose last name is Manners.
Peter F. McKellar
Even our dear parents who spoke of our achievements every potentially appropriate moment in their late life journeys, never empowered us as much as you.
Neither Gil nor I head the Malibu Right to Vote Initiative, nor did we ever even address the City Council on that issue.
In your mind, we had the ability to elect some and defeat others. You fed rumors of pseudo charges and incriminations horrifying those parents. However, being generally conscious, law abiding people, authorities never questioned us, neither lawsuits nor charges were ever filed against us. After feeding it in the first place, you never printed that truth. I wonder why?
You have made the image of two people very large, and we feel humbled by your inflated descriptions. Neither we nor MCLC head or sponsor the Initiative. We do believe in it though, Arnold as we believe in and support ball fields. (I hope you don’t call them the Segel ball fields.) Marilyn Dove, whom we have met only recently, has worked hard heading it. As everyone knows and I’m sure you agree, her work is worth honoring, Arnold.
You and your paper would profit from large development in Malibu, we have virtually nothing to gain.
So if the land air and water win from what you say about our defense of them, thank you, Arnold, it is enough. If the children win from our support of fund-raising to buy needed ball parks, thank you, Arnold, it would be enough.
If needed smart development comes to Malibu and unneeded development is kept out, thank you.
If environmental destruction and traffic disasters are contained at last, thank you Arnold.
And if we succeed in feeling compassion towards you in our hearts for your wounded need to attack us or what we support, thank you, thank you, thank you.
For that would be our greatest challenge. Maybe then you will have served the consciousness of us all.
Joanne Segel
