City Council Wants More Time before Entering Morning View Traffic Fray

• Meeting to Try for a Broader Cross-Section of Opinions

BY SUZANNE GULDIMANN

The Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District experienced what some saw as a setback this week with its Malibu High School Measure BB improvement plans, when a traffic and safety plan for Morning View Drive that district consultants had helped craft with city staff was postponed by the Malibu City Council until March 23.
Responding to public pressure, the council decided not to hear the Morning View Drive traffic and parking item until it had an opportunity to obtain more input.
“I am going to do that,” Councilmember Sharon Barovsky said. “ There are a lot of kids here. I am going to move that it be continued for my own reasons,” she said, “But I hate to do that at the end of the evening and have everybody stay for no reason.”
“We have to stay,” quipped Mayor Andy Stern
“I received a lot of emails,” Barovsky said. “And I’ve actually talked to both sides on this. The one thing I find very troubling, obviously there is a horrible problem with traffic on Morning View, and I agree with that but the thing that bothers me is a group got together to solve the problem and they left out the other half and I think we need to get 50 percent of the people left out of 100 percent of the problem. You have a problem. I did check out the MPSC, Malibu Park Safety Coalition. As far as I know, [it] did not extend [an invitation] to the PTA and parents to come to their meetings and planning sessions.
“I want to continue this, not for a long time but a very brief time and I want to at least have a council member to sit in to hear because I’ve been told that there are other solutions. There has to be a solution up there, it may not be this solution,” Barovsky said. “Maybe it isn’t taking parking out. The parents also have to recognize that residents have problems. You can’t just ignore that. No solution is going to work when you’ve got 50 percent of people saying they hate this solution. It’s doomed to failure.”
The council agreed to direct staff to organize a meeting between MPSC, parents, students, the PTA, school officials, two members of the Youth Commission, Mayor Andy Stern and Councilmember Pamela Conley Ulich, and then to bring the matter back to the city council in a month.
The plan that was not considered included recommendations to install limited parking signs on the school side of Morning View Drive that would prohibit parking during pick-up and drop-off hours of 7-9 a.m. and 1:30-3:30 p.m.; increase law enforcement presence during pick-up and drop-off at the school, work with the school district to encourage students with permits to park on campus instead of on the street; send parking and circulation information to students and parents; work with the district to find alternate school parking options; and monitor short-term changes through the end of the year, with a provision to allocate up to $30,000 from the Undesignated General Fund Reserve.
Prior to the council meeting, school district Superintendent Tim Cuneo expressed optimism that the plan would help solve campus gridlock and safety problems.
“We’ve been working with the City of Malibu and the neighbors,” Cuneo told the board of education at its Feb. 19 meeting. “We believe we have resolution. The city is putting together an item to meet the interests of the neighborhood and the school.”
Two district-sponsored, Measure BB-funded workshops have focused exclusively on traffic and parking issues and have involved the services of a professional traffic consultant. Both meetings were attended by school officials and members of the public. The district has lauded the meetings as a positive example of community and school cooperation, in sharp contrast to the field lighting issue that the superintendent has called “contentious and divisive.”
Despite the publicized meetings, many parents expressed frustration in emails to the city council, stating that they had been unaware of the city’s plans, and had not been included in the process. Others had criticism for MPSC’s proposals, which were included in the city staff report. The MPSC position paper outlined concerns that included emergency vehicle access and the lack of a safe way for students to exit vehicles and enter the school, but the group stance upset some parents because it contained recommendations for limits on street parking and suggestions that students could walk to school from Pacific Coast Highway.
The staff report is available on the city Web site at www.ci.malibu.ca.us, the school district’s Measure BB improvement plans for Malibu High School are located on the district Web site at smmusd.org