• The Publisher’s Notebook •

Foggy Thinking in Malibu

BY ANNE SOBLE

The fog isn’t quite as welcome as the rain we recently received, but don’t tell that to the local plant life that wantonly luxuriated in the thick coating of wetness that marked this week’s weather. As the fog bank settled in, the condensation was so heavy that moisture ran in rivulets from the screening on The News offices’ back door. Nothing evaded water’s touch.
As long as everyone remembers to slow down and drive carefully, coastal fog has none of the harshness, or the pollutants, of urban fog, such as found in London, or the cryptlike grayness of the tule fog up north. Still, fog can put decision-making on hold as it encourages cocooning, which may not be a bad idea, given how the world around us is being buffeted now.
Foggy thinking, however, is another matter. It can cause chaos in personal lives, and upend entities small and large, from corporations to governments. We need not reiterate the nature of the murky socioeconomic undercurrents now making many of our individual and collective lives complicated and unstable.
On the community front, this can take the form of actions that undermine the best of plans and lead to unintended consequences. On Monday morning, one of the first people to enter the newspaper’s offices was upset that, over the Thanksgiving holiday, it appears that the local school district has created what yet another critical resident described as a view-threatening “tropical jungle” in Malibu Park.
In one fell swoop, some six dozen palm trees were planted on the Malibu High School campus without notice, despite a recent pledge by local school district officials that the school’s neighbors would be included in the campus redesign and improvement process.
Some neighbors are asking why palm trees were chosen. Not only are the rapid growers non-native and high maintenance, they can become tiki torches during a wildfire. Even without flying embers to set the trees ablaze, the fronds become missiles in Santa Ana winds, causing personal injury, or property damage.
Others are asking why the district decided to do this now. Officials were calming criticism that they have ignored the impact of proposed MHS changes on the neighborhood. The district stopped requesting that important public notices be set in six-point type in two-inch boxes, and began announcing meetings in a format that doesn’t require a magnifying glass.
Most Malibu Park residents viewed these changes as part of a new district commitment to openness, but the palm trees might undo all this. The palm trees are not just the wrong plants, they’re the wrong message.