Publisher’s Notebook

• Official Malibu Street Savvy •

ANNE SOBLE

Malibu rolled with the shock waves of two earthquakes—one in Baja, the other six miles off the local coast—last weekend, but those reverberations paled in comparison with the impact on the community of the death of a 13-year-old girl on Pacific Coast Highway barely a day after the fatality of a visitor at Broad Beach.
Hundreds shared their grief and love for this local child on social networks. Saturday’s crash site was visited by an untold number of her peers, and people did not have to know Emily Rose Shane personally to be affected by the tragedy of a promising young life cut short.
We are reminded, as we have been too often in recent weeks, that Pacific Coast Highway is more than our community thoroughfare. It is a state highway and requires the kind of monitoring that road status warrants, and which people are starting to ask if it is getting now.
On Monday, I received well over a dozen telephone calls and emails asking why this stretch of state highway is not under the California Highway Patrol. It seems that Malibu’s first city officials were essentially strong-armed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in that it refused to contract for law enforcement services, if it didn’t get the contract (and revenue) for traffic control as well. Those were flush economic times, and the LASD could afford to play a waiting game until it got what it wanted. In 2010, the same agency needs every dollar it can find and might not afford to play so hard to get.
The majority of these calls and emails express the opinion that the CHP’s primary focus is traffic control. Several of them inquired whether there might have been a faster response to the four 911 calls made from Topanga to Webb Way about the behavior of Saturday’s driver, if a CHP car was on the PCH to respond.
In addition, some of these people maintain that CHiPs often know local roads better. Possible case in point, as I drove down Kanan to PCH Saturday night, and waited in line at the roadblock, I heard a sheriff’s deputy, and several well-intentioned civilians helping him out, tell drivers, including people who said they live just on the other side of the closure, to make a U-turn, go back up Kanan to Mulholland, take Mulholland to Decker, and Decker to PCH.
Just as I inched toward the intersection, the deputy walked over to his vehicle and went on his cell phone. I politely called out, said I was a member of the press with credentials and wanted to speak with him. I wanted to tell him that there is a five-minute shortcut west through Point Dume. Cell phone to his ear, he responded, “I don’t have time to answer questions. Keep moving.”
As a result, mine was the lone car to turn left, then right onto Zumirez and head to Heathercliff. I encountered a steady line of eastbound traffic carefully snaking through the reverse route. Obviously, a deputy on the other side of the accident knew the detour that the deputy at Kanan apparently was too busy to hear about and possibly spare hundreds of drivers a lengthy excursion over canyon roads.
New Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station Captain Joseph Stephen is scheduled to be at the Malibu City Council meeting next Monday night. That might be a good time for citizens with concerns about the PCH to bring them up.