Meet The Candidate: Bruce Silverstein

MALIBU, CA — Anyone following City Hall meetings in the past two years has probably heard Bruce Silverstein. Since the Woolsey Fire broke out, the City Council candidate has used public comment time to advocate for waiving Woolsey Fire rebuilding permit fees, against creating parking lots in the city’s vacant lots, or to accuse the Malibu city staff and city manager of a “disregard and lack of care for the city’s vision statement and mission statement,” among other topics.

The outspoken attorney is running for Council in large part because he feels that the City Council has become “largely ceremonial” and a “kangaroo court” that is too deferential to City Attorney Christi Hogan and City Manager Reva Feldman. Silverstein said in an interview with the Malibu Times that Feldman is too focused on the city budget, at the expense of city quality of life, and Hogan gives the city “black and white” advice when the truth is more nuanced.

Silverstein says on his campaign website that one of his goals is to “hire a responsible city attorney,” and argues that Hogan “explain[s] the law in a way that is designed to manipulate the City Council to take action that furthers the personal agenda of the City Attorney or City Manager” and “publicly assert[s] legal positions that are contrary to the best interests of the City.”

Silverstein is a semi-retired attorney who has noted that Malibu’s City Council has not had a lawyer on its ranks for over a decade, which is generally unusual for Councils. He said that the Council needs a lawyer to serve as a check on the City Attorney.

He also feels that Malibu would be better-served by staff who live there, and said on his campaign website that “concerted efforts should be made to hire qualified Malibu residents.”

Silverstein also said that he would initiate proposals to give the Council greater control over agenda items, give public commenters the same amount of time as city staff to discuss those items, and create an independent commission to investigate “credible claims of corruption” in City Hall.

“I’ve heard too many rumors to ignore them and I believe that it’s time to take a look at them. Not pre-judge them, but take a look at them,” he told the Times. “And one of the powers that city council has, which I don’t see it exercising—in fact, I spoke to one city council member about it and he told me that he’d never even been told that they have this power—um, is the power to issue subpoenas. Just like Congresspeople, they can conduct investigations just like congressional investigations.”

In the same interview, Silverstein said that he has agreed, “with some reluctance,” to pledge to fire Feldman if elected. He said that he has the right to fire her without cause - simply as a result of “lack of confidence” as opposed to any particular allegations - and would view his election as a mandate from Malibuites to replace her.

Like a few other candidates, Silverstein said he wanted to get involved in city politics after what he views as the mismanagement of the Woolsey Fire.

“I went to a City Council meeting on Dec. 10, I believe it was - this was the first regularly scheduled City Council meeting following the fire - expecting to see them in exigency mode trying to figure out what could be done to help people, and instead they spent 90 minutes to two hours congratulating themselves on the last two years and welcoming new Council members,” he told Patch. “I was floored, and I made a decision right then and there to start getting involved, because I knew that was totally unacceptable.”

Silverstein advocated for a furniture bank to collect furniture donations, which was never executed, and the waiving of permit rebuilding fees, which was. “They collected a quarter of a million dollars in fees from Woolsey Fire victims, and they had budgeted that they were gonna collect over $2.5 million, even though I and others had been saying you need to waive these fees,” he said. “It was only as a result of the public advocacy that they finally got around to recognizing they needed to do that.”

Silverstein says that he tried to fight a whole army of lawyers who were trying to overcharge on contingency fees. Under the guise of Operation Recovery’s Lawyer Project, he helped hire a law firm to take on 100 cases after the fire, which resulted in a lower contingency rate than other lawyers were promising. Silverstein originally hoped 6-800 residents would band together to get a 12 or 13 percent contingency rate, but there was not enough interest.

Southern California Edison contends Quinn Emanuel, the firm Silverstein initially helped select, represented a conflict of interest because Ken Chiate, its lead attorney, had experience defending electric companies in fire cases, and the firm had been interviewed to defend SCE two years earlier. A judge ruled in favor of SCE, and another law firm, Engstrom, Lipscomb, & Lack, replaced Quinn Emanuel.

“The alleged conflict had nothing to do with them being not the best people to represent the residents. The alleged conflict was they were too good to represent the residents,” Silverstein told the Times, arguing the decision should be appealed. “And, in fact, all that was discussed at the February 10, um, Operation Recovery meeting at which they presented. The potential for this motion was on the table and clearly disclosed and discussed.”

Moving forward, Silverstein wants to conduct an independent investigation into the city’s Woolsey readiness. He criticizes an existing review by current Councilmembers Rick Mullen and Skylar Peak as insufficient and marred by conflict of interest. “Mullen and Peak managed to downgrade the “investigation” of the City’s preparation and response to the Woolsey Fire to an “identification” of measures to improve the City’s response to the next fire,” he wrote on his website.

So far, he is not impressed with the city’s efforts to prevent future fires, arguing that it has not publicized its new evacuation plans well enough. “The best I can tell, all they’ve done is shore up a little bit their phone and email system to get people notifications,” he said. “I don’t know that they really have any true evacuation plan. In fact I was looking at their website just yesterday, where it says you can see the evacuation zones, and it’s just page and page of maps without any explanation. I know that I wouldn’t know what I would do if there were another fire tomorrow, other than fend for myself.”

Silverstein wants to draft an orderly, well-publicized evaluation and shelter-in place plans. He argues that residents were left to fend for themselves during the fire, and the city should have helped get vital supplies like water and food to people who choose to get left behind.

Quality of life and the environment represent another large part of Silverstein’s platform. Silverstein says that he and his wife, who moved to Malibu nine years ago, originally leased a condo on Carbon Beach, but when the upstairs condo was converted into a short-term rental, noisy guests forced them to eventually move.

He feels that the recently-approved short-term rental laws, which issue revocable STR permits and require the property to be the owner’s principal residence, are a step in the right direction, because they will prevent wealthy out-of-town investors from opening up more properties. He disputes the City Attorney’s claims that short-term rentals are even legal to begin with, and that the city cannot pass a general ordinance and bypass the Coastal Commission.

“The law should be adopted as a general ordinance of the City of Malibu, it should not be submitted for approval by the Coastal Commission, and it should go into operation ASAP,” Silverstein wrote in a Malibu Surfside News questionnaire. “After that, it also will be incumbent upon the city to enforce the law, and not turn a blind eye to a tax revenue producing criminal enterprise.”

Silverstein also advocates an ordinance that would require permits for RVs to stay on PCH, and steeply fining non-compliance. He feels that this would not violate the Martin v. Boise decision, which ruled that homeless people cannot be fined for sleeping outside in an absence of alternatives, because permits would be issued to people who could prove they were homeless, and the ordinance would specify a time and place where RV’s can camp.

Silverstein says that the city should be prepared to shoulder a “proportionate share” of different state and county-wide initiatives to help the homeless. “Malibu can’t solve these problems - the Malibu CIty Council should not be finding ways to solve homelessness,” he said, and said that he doesn’t feel that the city has the resources to house a homeless shelter.

Silverstein also said that the city needs more aggressive enforcement of speeding and parking on Pacific Coast Highway in order for it to be safer.

To raise more revenue, SIlverstein advocates increasing the Transient Occupancy Tax, creating a vehicle parking tax for privately owned beach parking lots, create fees for parking on public streets for non-residents, and look into charging for any company that wants to use the word “Malibu” in its name.

He also says that the City Council should look into cutting staff, renegotiating or terminating existing contracts, and other “reasonable cost-cutting measures.”