Development Ruse Roils Malibu's Local Election

If Malibu needed another reason why Paul Grisanti should not be reelected and, if it was legally to do so, tarred and feathered and run out of town, they should watch five minutes of Monday night’s City Council meeting.

In all my years writing about design and development and as an activist urban planner in the public and private sectors never had I heard such a garbled proposal for a blatant land grab and flawed development scheme undermining a municipality, and short-changing its children as orchestrated by Grisanti and performed by a Howard Rudski .

Shocking, shameful were a few of the polite terms prompted by those witnessed the bumbling performance of Rudski, a local resident and self-described real estate investor with an apparent foot in the back door of City Hall.

The clearly covetous Rudski had been presumptuously invited to address the Council by a smarmy Grisanti as a precede to a presentation by a groveling consultant team that has been conducting a community outreach program on the future of five vacant city parcels

What the city should and could do with the five parcels does call for more study, hopefully more focused and professional than what appeared be a ruse for some sort of private profit stratagem in which the clear loser will be Malibu.

That hopefully will be taken up by a new council, with a reform majority of a reelected Bruce Silverstein and Steve Uhring, and Andy Lyon, who in a rare write in victory puts to pasture Grisanti.

And let us further hope that pasture is environmentally sensitive and zoned as protected open space.