Termed-Out Council Members Take Forward
Look at the Past
• Outgoing City Leaders Take Pride in
Role Played in Development of Municipal Services
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.
