Malibu Rejects Bus Shelter Firm’s $20,000 : Development: The check was unsolicited. The company plans to erect 20 shelters along the Pacific Coast Highway under a contract with the county.

Malibu’s council-elect on Tuesday rejected as inappropriate a $20,000 unsolicited check it received from a company that wants to put 20 bus shelters in Malibu.

The company, Bustop Shelters of California, does not need the council’s permission to build the shelters, but company spokesman Al Lopez told the council members that the check was a “revenue advancement” for allowing the company to erect the enclosures along Pacific Coast Highway.

Advertisements on the shelters are expected to generate $700 to $1,000 a month per shelter in revenues for the company, with a minimum of $75 per shelter guaranteed to the city after it legally incorporates.

Bustop Shelters has contracted with Los Angeles County Public Works Department to build 280 enclosures throughout unincorporated areas of the county over the next 10 years. Under the agreement, 10% of the ad revenues from the shelters goes to the county treasury. Upon incorporation, that revenue would start going to the city of Malibu.

Questioned by Councilwoman Missy Zeitsoff, Lopez said he couldn’t recall if his company had given a similar inducement check to the county before signing the contract with the county last September. “But we do this all the time,” he said.

Bustop Shelter President Jean Claude LeRoyer confirmed Wednesday that his company typically gives a city a “signing bonus” for allowing shelters in the city limits.

But he characterized the offer of a check to the Malibu council as “a mistake.”

“County staff told us Malibu would be incorporated at any time, like next week,” he said. “That’s why we offered it.”

However, Ron Ornee, the county’s bus shelter project manager, denied any knowledge of the company’s practice of offering bonus checks and also denied giving Bustop Shelters a firm incorporation date.

“It’s common knowledge that Malibu voted to become a city,” Ornee said. “The company may have taken this information and distorted it.”

Ornee emphasized that neither Bustop Shelters nor the county needs the go-ahead from the Malibu council to build the shelters.

“Malibu is still part of the unincorporated county,” he said. “We can put the shelters anywhere we want in Malibu, whether or not the council agrees.”