ELECTIONS MALIBU CITYHOOD : Incorporation Foes Try Last-Minute Bid to Defeat Proposal

With the election little more than a week away, a group opposed to Malibu’s becoming a city has launched a campaign to defeat cityhood when voters decide the issue June 5.

“We think we’ve got a chance to change people’s minds,” said Glenn Heller, chairman of Concerned Citizens for Protecting Malibu’s Future. “There are a lot of people out there who haven’t made up their minds yet.”

The group contends that Malibu’s projected $5-million budget is not adequate to operate a city and that a new city of Malibu could face financial ruin from liability as a result of future landslides.

Cityhood supporters immediately accused the group of engaging in a “last-minute campaign of deception” and suggested that the group is a front for real estate developers concerned that cityhood will restrict growth in the community.

“These are the same bogus arguments people out here have been hearing forever,” said Gary Amo, a political consultant for MCI/YES on Y, a pro-cityhood group that was formerly the Malibu Committee for Incorporation. “What you’re seeing is an attempt to use deception and sow seeds of doubt at the last minute.”

An official with Concerned Citizens, however, dismissed the notion that developers were involved in the effort.

“We’re clean as a whistle on that score,” said Margaret Richards, the group’s treasurer. “We’ve collected more than $2,000 so far, and I can verify that there’s not a developer dollar in it.”

She said that in the week since the group began to distribute material and advertise in Malibu’s two weekly newspapers, it has received “more than 200 phone calls from people who think the cityhood proposal is a bad idea and want to do what they can to prevent it.”

Besides deciding whether Malibu incorporates, voters will select a five-member City Council from among 30 candidates.

Two of the candidates, Jack Corrodi and Dennis Sinclair, are openly opposed to cityhood. And several other candidates, while saying they support cityhood, have opposed it in the past and have indicated that they are in the race because they view incorporation as inevitable and want to have a say in the new city’s affairs.

Sinclair and Corrodi have helped distribute Concerned Citizen’s literature although neither has identified himself formally with the group. Bob Greenberg, the campaign chairman for candidate Ronald S. Bloomfield, drew up a list of 13 questions the group included on a flyer that was distributed last week at a seminar sponsored by MCI.

Greenberg, however, said he is not a member of the group. He and Bloomfield helped to found the Committee for 90265, a dissident cityhood group that split away from MCI in 1988.

Heller said the group plans “to go all out in the days leading up to the election to get our message across.”

“If cityhood happens, we think that the very thing the people pushing cityhood are trying to prevent--the big-time development and all the rest--is what’s going to happen, because with the budget insufficient as it is, the new city won’t have any choice but to favor development projects to keep the city going.”

Although they are the only two individuals publicly associated with the group, neither Heller nor Richards is registered to vote in the Malibu election.

Heller, a caterer, moved to Malibu three months ago and said he is registered in Los Angeles. Richards, although a Malibu resident for 15 years, is a citizen of Canada. She owns a Santa Monica advertising agency.

Heller, who until recently was a member of the kitchen staff at the Malibu Adobe restaurant, said the group includes “a corps of about 50 people.”

He agreed to be its volunteer chairman two weeks ago, he said, after some people he met at the restaurant told him about the effort and asked him to give Richards a call.

“We were talking at the bar after I got off work, and they said they needed a point man, someone to be a spokesman, and since I agree with the cause, I said I would do it,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t even get their names.”

Richards, who is co-chairwoman of the Big Rock Improvement Committee, said Heller consented to take over the day-to-day task of managing the group after someone else “who is still very active with us said he would prefer to take a less public role.

“If people are looking for a big conspiracy here involving developers, they’re not going to find it,” she said. “We’re just mainly homeowners who are concerned that if cityhood goes through, and the (county’s proposed) sewer system is delayed, it’s going to cause mega-problems for Malibu.”