Malibu's Critical Local Election

The preeminent choices in the upcoming local election have to be the most obvious in Malibu’s short history as a city.

If you truly care about the future of Malibu as a blessed, benign community, Council stalwarts Bruce Silverstein and Steve Uhring must be reelected and the guileful Grisanti rejected.

The thinking among the Silverstein and Uhring supporters is that a bullet vote for the two reformers will assure their return to council, while somehow the third seat will not go to Grisanti.

The hope is that the seat instead will go to either Channing Frykman or Haylynn Conrad, though several in the reform camp lean to the later, however resolutely ambiguous she has been.

Putting the choices in perspective is the worrisome fragility of Malibu still suffering the aftereffects of the Woolsey Fire and the ineptness of an extended, woeful City Council majority and the hardening of bureaucratic arteries.

Beyond the inevitable natural disasters are the increasing threats of the coastal community being overdeveloped and oversold by realtors as a tourist and trophy house conceit.

The city’s founding vision protecting the environment that lends Malibu its soul and value has been slowly but surely corrupted by real estate interests bound by greed and power.

Falsely smiling and faking amiability, backed by big buck developers, these interests this election campaign seems particularly perfidious, blatantly lying about opponents, trying to intimidate their loyal followers and scare off others. Thugs.

And this while wooing their own supporters, who are motivated by the promise of profiteering as Grisanti and some past mayors have, if only for a few pennies and the power, or from a misguided fealty.

You can never underestimate the greed and gullibility of people.