City Attorney Slams Unauthorized Usage of Municipal Logo and Seal

• Developer’s Consultant Says It’s a Misunderstanding

BY BILL KOENEKER

While both sides battle at this week’s Malibu Planning Commission meeting over a proposed road in upper Sweetwater Mesa, the opponents have been quietly circulating a document that is raising some local eyebrows.
It is a letter from the Malibu City Attorney to the land use consulting firm Don Schmitz and Associates, demanding that formatted documents being submitted to the city by Schmitz’s office should immediately cease.
“The purpose of this letter is to demand that you immediately cease all unauthorized use of the City of Malibu’s logo, seal, letterhead and planning commission agenda report form,” wrote City Attorney Christi Hogin.
“I am informed that you have submitted what purports to be a staff report and resolution to the planning commission. In fact, you or your associates prepared the document and submitted it in a format that could be confused with the city staff’s true work product.”
Schmitz declined to speak to the Malibu Surfside News on the record and referred for the record to a letter his attorney sent to Hogin about the matter.
“The document to which you refer was submitted as a draft, which staff was free to use or reject. It was presented to staff on that basis. There was no attempt to mislead city staff as to it purpose,” wrote Schmitz’s attorney Stanley Lamport.
Both parties agree that it is not unusual for private planning consultants to submit information for inclusion in a staff report, or even to submit a suggested draft of the report.
However, Lamport acknowledges this submission went much further. “What distinguished this situation is that the submission appeared on a city format. This unique occurrence has never happened before and, in light of the concerns you expressed in your letter, will not occur again. It occurred because a Schmitz associate used that format with the thought it would make it easier for staff to complete the report,” Lamport went on to write.
Hogin indicated the uses of the city’s logo and “the documents you prepared mock the city’s format and fraudulently state that the report was” prepared by staff, reviewed by the planning manager and approved by the head of the department.
“In the future, however, the city will not accept documents fraudulently styled as ‘staff reports.’ We view this as an aggressive and inappropriate effort to usurp the city’s role as an independent evaluator of a project application,” the city attorney concluded.
Lamport disagreed, noting the draft was delivered to the city personally and the Schmitz planner showed the document to the city planner and specifically discussed the use of the city format with the planner at the time.
“The city planner did not raise any objections to the document and took it knowing how it was formatted. What occurred was not ‘an aggressive and inappropriate effort to usurp the city…’ as you claim. All of us, Schmitz and Associates included, have always understood that your city’s staff has the ultimate say on the content of the report to the planning commission and city council. For that very reason, Schmitz and Associates submitted the document in question not only in a printed form, but as a word document on a disc so staff could modify if and as it chose. We hope that this situation can be recognized for the honest effort to provide information to assist city staff that it was, rather than presumed to be something it was not,” the Schmitz attorney concluded.