Termed-Out Council Members Take Forward Look at the Past

• Outgoing City Leaders Take Pride in Role Played in Development of Municipal Services

BY HANS LAETZ

With a combined 20 years on the Malibu City Council, Jeff Jennings and Ken Kearsley have a common assessment of what their legacies at Malibu City Hall will be like after they step down from office next Monday:
“My realistic suspicion is that two days after we’re gone, no one is going to remember our names,” said Jennings.
“Yeah, in two years people will be saying ‘I’ll never forget old Mister Whatshisname,’” Kearsley agreed.
The Malibu Surfside News sat the two departing council members down last week for iced tea and a critical self-assessment of their time on the council, which is coming to an end as a result of term limitations approved by voters at the urging of then Councilmember Tom Hasse in 2000.
Jennings won his first council term in 1994 and lost a reelection bid in 1998, before winning new terms in 2000 and 2004. Kearsley spent four years on the city planning commission before winning a council seat in 2000, and reelection in 2004.
That election back in 2000 may have marked a changing of the guard, in which two founders of the city left office as a new group of council members took over and changed direction. Supporters of the old guard said their emphasis had been on stopping growth and bringing control of the Malibu coast to the new little city. Jennings and Kearsley both said it was time for the city to grow up.
“When we took office, the city was dead in the water,” Kearsley said. “There was no momentum. We decided it was time to start things moving, time to take some chances.
Jennings concurred: “A lot of what the prior council had done was conflict-driven. Their motive was to shape the destiny of the city as a separate matter, and control our destiny. But the battling wasn’t getting us anywhere.”
With that, and with former Councilmember Harry Barovsky and—after his death—his widow Sharon Barovsky and Andy Stern, the council often voted as a bloc, something that some Malibuites have been uneasy with.
Both council members said their objectives had been to work out a consensus amongst council members on difficult issues before they came down to a vote, and then support whatever solution came out, even if it included unpalatable aspects. Opponents called that dealmaking, Jennings and Kearsley said they call it leadership.
“That’s the difference between winning an election, and governing a city,” Kearsley said. “The revolutionaries like Walt Keller were good at revolutions, but not so good at running things.”
His colleague agreed. “Among state agencies, Malibu had built up the reputation of being a maverick, of being very difficult to deal with. Other cities were telling the state: ‘Go pick on Malibu, they won’t deal with anyone.’”
“We had to get credibility with all the other agencies,” said Kearsley. “We worked on that. The proof of the pudding is in the number of lawsuits we were involved in. The first year I was on the council, I found us in the middle of 27 lawsuits. Right now we are down to four.”
Jennings said the collapse of Kanan-Dume Road just inside city limits in 1996, and the subsequent refusal by the pioneer city council to repair it for a year, was an example of the type of government he opposed. “The city council’s attitude was ‘we never agreed to take care of it,’ and the county said, ‘fix your road.’ We didn’t have the money to do it, and some members of the council were happy it was closed. I went for breakfast with [Los Angeles County Supervisor] Zev Yaroslavsky and told him if he lent us the money, we’d fix the road and repay them. That’s all it took.”
Kearsley said the difficult-to-deal-with city leadership was reflected in employee turnover. “We had 35 percent employee attrition every year when we started. Last year we lost two people, and they’re both on their way to better jobs.”
More than 70 employees now work for the city, a much larger staff than eight years ago. “When we started the city,” said Jennings, “the concept was we’d get volunteers to help run things. Well, the city is a service organization, not a business. The increase in personnel correlates with the increase in service.”
The men differed on what they thought were the biggest issues that they were unable to solve, with Jennings saying he worries most about the proposed ordinance to force some trees to be trimmed to preserve ocean views.
“The view ordinance must be addressed by the council no matter what the result of the advisory vote [in this week’s election],” Jennings said. “If it goes to an initiative, it will be written in stone and it may eat our budget alive in court costs, like it did in Rancho Palos Verdes.”
Kearsley said his biggest regret is that the city has not been able to build any additional baseball and soccer fields. “We bought Bluffs Park, but we bought something we already were using,” he said. “That is not enough.”
Jennings said Malibu has made tremendous strides on water quality issues, and is trotted out for publicity whenever environmental groups need to attract L.A. TV cameras to a news conference about problems that exist anywhere in the state: “The problem of water quality is a real problem, but it’s every city’s problem. The entire state hasn’t come to terms with runoff into the ocean, the state hasn’t even come up with a baseline level of regulations.”
Which leads both men to the subject of Legacy Park. “One of the huge problems Malibu has always had was Malibu Creek,” Kearsley said. “People here always said ‘blame Tapia’ or ‘blame Calabasas.’ They blamed us.
“We said, ‘OK, we’ll fix our 100 acres out of the hundred square miles of Malibu Creek drainage. We’ll step up and our city of 14,000 people will come up with $35-40 million so not one drop of our water will go into the creek period, and to build a central park in the deal.’ ”
Jennings said he is infuriated when people blithely say that Malibu has a septic tank problem. “Guess what: nearly all septic tanks work. [the public works director] Vic Peterson is absolutely deaf to any suggestion that the city cut slack for somebody with a sewer problem—if a house septic fails, it gets tagged. We’re going to make some Malibu people angry with that.”
The two council members said they never intended to run as a team, but are satisfied that concrete results like the new parks in Las Flores and Trancas canyons, improvements to Civic Center Way, city purchase of Bluffs Park, construction of surface runoff treatment plants, and $15 million in the undesignated city reserve fund, came from the consensus they helped to forge.
Jennings, 64, will continue to practice law, from a relocated office at Zuma Beach. Kearsley, 71, said he will continue operating an aerospace engineering firm in Santa Monica that he owns with a relative.