Now for the Hard Part : Malibu: It was one thing to fight a popular battle against county rule. Now the new city has to get down to the business of governing.

Having endured a long battle with Los Angeles County, Malibu becomes a city Thursday amid pomp and ceremony and an official optimism as wide as its famous beaches.

“No one said it would be easy, but after struggling for so long under the county, we’re ready to try and solve our own problems,” Mayor-elect Walt Keller said, in what has become a standard refrain among Malibu’s leaders.

But as he and other members of the City Council prepare to take office under the watchful eyes of cityhood partisans--and the Goodyear blimp, which will help mark the occasion--the euphoria may not last long.

“We’ve got our work cut out for us,” Councilman-elect Mike Caggiano said. “We’ve demonstrated that we’re good at stopping things, like the county’s sewer plans. Now we’re going to have to shift gears and get down to the business of governing.”

Indeed, if the 84% of the voters who chose cityhood expected self-rule to be a piece of cake, they may already have had second thoughts.

Among the new City Council’s first official acts Thursday will be the approval of an emergency law to temporarily ban commercial and multifamily development while restricting the construction of new houses in the seaside community.

A development crackdown had been widely anticipated in Malibu since last June’s incorporation election, but reaction to the proposed law thus far has not gone according to script.

Angry opponents have packed several recent meetings of the council, which has met unofficially since the election, denouncing the restrictions on single-family homes as harsh and warning of economic ruin for construction-related businesses and people whose projects are caught by the ban.

A majority of the five-member council, citing a mandate to get control of Malibu’s development, favors the restrictions.

After enduring heckling, hisses and boos during two stormy sessions, the council scheduled a special hearing at a local school last month in the clear hope that residents from Malibu’s presumed slow-growth majority would come out and back them up.

But of the more than 300 people who attended, fewer than six spoke on behalf of the restrictions.

“Most people don’t like being yelled at in front of a hostile crowd,” Councilwoman-elect Carolyn Van Horn, a supporter of the restrictions, explained later. “That’s why they elected us.”

Thursday’s first official meeting of the City Council at the 600-seat Malibu Park School Auditorium will be largely ceremonial, in keeping with the weekend’s schedule of celebratory events.

“It (the auditorium) was the biggest place in town,” said Joan House, who heads a volunteer group organizing the celebrations, including a parade and post-parade party on Saturday.

The blimp is scheduled to circle the school for half an hour before Thursday’s council meeting, then glide along the length of the Malibu coastline. It will flash an electronic congratulatory message as it flies above the new city, organizers said.

Plans call for County Supervisor Ed Edelman, a supporter of Malibu’s cityhood effort, to preside at the meeting until the five council members take the oath of office.

Cityhood partisans say that even the worst discord among themselves is better than the years of indifference and outright hostility they contend they have endured under the county.

“We’re going to have our share of problems, but we’re far ahead on day one of cityhood having the arena of government right here as opposed to 40 miles away in downtown Los Angeles,” Van Horn said.

Besides the development issue, the council is expected to take immediate action Thursday to start the process of hiring a consultant to explore alternatives to the county’s ill-fated $43-million sewer proposal.

The action is part of a cease-fire the county announced two weeks ago in its longtime effort to build the sewer. County officials agreed not to push the project for 90 days while allowing the new city to come up with a waste-water management plan of its own.

The sewer issue and the course of future development in the community figure to dominate public debate as the new city government asserts itself in the coming months.

But Malibu’s leaders will most likely have to devote much of their immediate attention to more mundane matters.

Although negotiations have been under way for several weeks with the county Sheriff’s Department and other agencies to provide public services, none of the service contracts have been made final, and Malibu’s leaders have hinted that they may be forced to turn to private firms to provide some services, such as building inspections and street maintenance.

Few details about the cost of any of the services have been made public, but several council members have said the group had experienced “sticker shock” during recent negotiations with would-be service providers.

Although the Local Agency Formation Commission had projected a budget of about $5 million for Malibu’s first full year as a city, officials say the figure is more likely to exceed $6 million.

“Some costs have gone up, clearly,” Caggiano said, “but there are also some revenue sources available to us that weren’t reflected in the LAFCO budget, so there shouldn’t be a serious problem with first-year financing.”