Unaware of Deadline for Hearing, Aide Says

Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Executive Officer Larry Monteilh said Tuesday that he did not know that his decision to set a public hearing on the Malibu incorporation plan for Aug. 18 would make it impossible to put the issue on the ballot until next year.

“Frankly, I wasn’t even aware that there was any deadline to meet,” said Monteilh, adding that he had sent a memo to Supervisor Deane Dana, who represents the Malibu area, advising him of the Aug. 18 date. “Nobody told me anything about an election until the meeting notice went out.”

In order to assure Malibu residents a chance to vote on the issue this November, the public hearing would have to be scheduled no later than Aug. 11.

Monteilh said that moving the meeting to an earlier date would require approval by a majority of supervisors at their next scheduled meeting July 12. He said the board could set the matter “for any date they choose” up to Aug. 11, as long as he is able to provide the required 15-day public notice.

If the board chooses not to change the date, then the cityhood proposal could not be put to a vote in Malibu until next March at the earliest.

In his memo to Dana, Monteilh said that he wants to give the board “ample time” to review the cityhood proposal, even though the board’s action is a formality. Unless an overwhelming majority of Malibu’s voters protest the state Local Agency Formation Commission’s approval of a cityhood petition, supervisors are required to schedule an incorporation vote for the next countywide election.

Dana, who is traveling in London with Supervisors Pete Schabarum and Ed Edelman on a trade mission for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., could not be reached for comment.

LAFCO approved Malibu’s cityhood petition May 25, but the following week the Board of Supervisors voted to ask LAFCO to reconsider its vote and allow the county to retain control over sewers and landslide assessment districts in the area. LAFCO will consider that request at its hearing July 13.

Meanwhile, Pepperdine University, a major Malibu landowner that has been seeking ways to be excluded from the proposed city, apparently failed on Tuesday to have special legislation passed in Sacramento that would remove it from the proposed city boundaries.

University officials appealed to Sen. Gary Hart (D-Santa Barbara) and Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), whose districts include portions of Malibu, but were unable to persuade the legislators to back legislation to delete the campus from the proposed city.

Pepperdine, which is split nearly in half by the proposed city boundaries, is seeking exclusion from the proposed city because of concerns that a new city council would hamper its plans to expand the campus. Pepperdine officials say they currently have projects totaling $32 million awaiting approval by Los Angeles County planners.

“Incorporation is likely to delay the construction of these projects until the new city government is in place,” a letter that Pepperdine sent to LAFCO Friday said. “In addition, the projects which straddle the new city-county borders face the inevitable confusion of dealing with the procedures and agencies of two different entities when building a single project.”

Using that argument, however, Pepperdine University President David Davenport, university lobbyist Paul Priolo and campus Vice President Andrew Benton still could not persuade Hart or Hayden of the need for the legislation, according to their aides.