City Council Wants More Time before
Entering Morning View Traffic Fray
• Meeting to Try for a Broader
Cross-Section of Opinions
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
