Happy New Year Malibu

A New year traditionally is a time to pause and wish those near and dear good luck, say farewell to the past year and welcome in the new. And for that includes the Malibu known for a nearly a half century and Pt. Dume where I have lived now on to 30 of my 90 years.

It is quite easy to say goodbye to 2025 a year that began for me in Malibu with the devastating Palisades Fire and ended in Washington D.C. with the frightening abuses of a deranged president, the lockstep of his cruel entourage, a feckless Congress and a rending of a threatened Constitution.

I can only hope the national nightmare can somehow end in 2026 for it has made me disconsolate. If anything, this has focused my writings on reviewing books and culture for a select national media, and frankly further away from local social media, which with a few exceptions I now find sadly puerile.

But it is the new year, and in response to the continuing concerns for my floundering Malibu, I do want to express a welcome to its new city manager, Joe Irvin and wish him good luck.

It is I feel a gesture of hope over experience, for from my personal and professional perspective, Malibu has not been particularly served well by several of its past city managers.

As I have previously written, a former few infamous managers were known to be aided and abetted periodically by duplicitous city councils and a bloated indifferent City Hall bureaucracy, compromised by a rapacious local real estate community.

If our iconic seacoast village ever has any hope to recover from the Palisades fire, while inexcusably still reeling from the Woolsey fire, urgently needed is a committed, competent, trusted governance, transparent and accountable to an involved citizenry.

Hopefully it will be led by the new city manager, one who will avoid the usual gladhanding of special interests and a questionable roster of consultants, and who will eat lunch at his desk, not unabashedly at Nobu as a guest of someone seeking City Hall favors.

In sum, to repeat my echoing wishes of the past, a city manager who understands and appreciates Malibu’s heightened value as a livable exurban residential community, and not a tourist town of trophy houses and AirBnB rentals.

Most importantly, I would hope while assuming his contractual duties, will embrace the city’s noble Vision Statement, and pledge to pursue its Mission Statement, printed here from the Malibu Municipal Code, less we forget:

The Vision: Malibu is a unique land and marine environment and residential community whose citizens have historically evidenced a commitment to sacrifice urban and suburban conveniences in order to protect that environment and lifestyle, and to preserve unaltered natural resources and rural characteristics. The people of Malibu are a responsible custodian of the area’s natural resources for present and future generations.

The Mission: Malibu is committed to ensure the physical and biological integrity of its environment through the development of land use programs and decisions, to protect the public and private health, safety and general welfare. Malibu will plan to preserve its natural and cultural resources, which include the ocean, marine life, tide pools, beaches, creeks, canyons, hills, mountains, ridges, views, wildlife and plant life, open spaces, archaeological, paleontological and historic sites, as well as other resources that contribute to Malibu’s special natural and rural setting.

Malibu will maintain its rural character by establishing programs and policies that avoid suburbanization and commercialization of its natural and cultural resources.

Malibu will gradually recycle areas of deteriorated commercial development that detract from the public benefit or deteriorate the public values of its natural, cultural and rural resources.

Malibu will provide passive, coastal-dependent and resource-dependent visitor-serving recreational opportunities (at proper times, places and manners) that remain subordinate to their natural, cultural and rural setting, and which are consistent with the fragility of the natural resources of the area, the proximity of the access to residential uses, the need to protect the privacy of property owners, the aesthetic values of the area, and the capacity of the area to sustain particular levels of use.