Publisher’s Notebook

• Get Out the Malibu Rule Book Again •

ANNE SOBLE

We sincerely hope that when Malibu’s city attorney gets back from vacation at the end of the week, she’ll tell us that she’s going to soundly rap the knuckles of the folks who held a secret meeting last week and reconfigured the proposal that the city supposedly has put together for Trancas Park. Sure, we know the participants say it wasn’t a secret meeting, and think that should make it so, but it doesn’t.
This was a meeting about public policy that had just been determined, as it should be, at a public session of the Malibu City Council. There was a select list of invitees, no announcement was published or posted, and the press were purposely excluded because those naughty purveyors of information were guilty of pointing out some of the serious problems with the project and had the audacity to air the concerns of such repugnant watchdogs of the environment as the National Park Service.
Isn’t it terrible how some people allow facts to get in the way of other people’s fantasies? Now the last thing anyone wants to do is say anything negative about a pet project designed to reward any official’s personal friends and local campaign stalwarts, but sometimes the facts get in the way. Sure it’s true there are people moving to Malibu who want to suburbanize the community to death, or at least to Westchester or Culver City, but when there are solid arguments against this developmental dyspepsia, reason should at least have a fighting chance.
Personally, I would never let my Iditarod team set foot in a dog park. Running the risk of encountering animals of unknown health and temperament is not wise in my humble opinion. I feel similarly about the hygiene of a place with so many animals, ahem, eliminating in the same spot. As for the notion of socialization, it’s been shown that it’s the humans who want to interact. Exchanging the pack instinct for human bonding is what the canine domestication process is all about. If these views appear to be a personal case of the distemper virus, so be it.
The truth is this difference of opinion has less to do with dogs than with process. How many times must city powerbrokers be told that they have to do the public’s business (even when it concerns dogs doing their business) in public? Some of them keep forgetting that everyone’s ultimately going to learn what they do in private, so they may as well act openly and face the consequences. There are no delusions about elected officials dispensing favors as payback, but they should do it in clear view in front of the constituents whose views they are ignoring.