Publisher’s Notebook

• Malibu Lines Up the Lawsuits •

ANNE SOBLE

Was it that many years ago when one could watch Malibu City Council meetings and hear council members and the city attorney say, well, maybe it was true that a project was somewhat large for a neighborhood, but if it wasn’t approved, the city would get sued? When citizens voiced concern about pollution, traffic, wastewater disposal, blocking public trails, or other local issues, the response usually was something like “those guys have the bucks and the legal teams, so Malibu should knuckle under and save the money.”
The high cost of defending litigation in Malibu, nearly all of which is handled by outside counsel at top dollar, was a ceaseless mantra and helped to foster an atmosphere of intimidation among citizens who were encouraged to think that there was no alternative but to watch the community slowly be robbed of its personality and scale, even as other communities in the state successfully passed quality-of-life laws and won legal challenges against them.
However, now that the spotlight is on challenges to the city on environmental concerns and public interest issues, a council majority appears to be taking the opposite tack. Council members who quaked when developers roared, puff up their chests at those concerned about pollution, water safety, traffic or other quality-of-life issues. When environmentalists or public agency officials go before the council, they are sneered at openly. The mayor’s gavel is wielded on behalf of those who agree with the council and against those who question its policies. Cronies boo and hiss with impunity at speakers whose stature is acknowledged on local, state and national levels.
But this is about more than civility. It is neither happenstance, nor politics, that drives this willingness to let the litigation chips fall where they may with environmental groups and public interest agencies. Alternative voices to current municipal policies have no recourse but the courts because an intransigent council is consumed by a focus on meeting financial obligations that have been criticized from their inception. Quality of life has become secondary to a finance-driven beast that must be fed, even if it means transforming the community into a clone of every other upscale area on either coast. Those who say Malibu is a backwater that needs to be metamorphosed into Beverly Hills, TriBeCa, or the Hamptons, are clueless about Malibu and probably will never comprehend why it has the cachet it has around the world.
Some residents might not like this new dependency, but they may need the enviros and others to litigate to help prevent what is special about Malibu from being eradicated to meet the misguided constraints that have been foisted upon the community. In a Ponzi scheme, people lose money. In a Malibu scheme, they lose Malibu.