Men Under Fire Gain Some Respect in Malibu

Kind deeds, kind words: It has not been easy for day laborers in Malibu.

Merchants say the men, who are mostly from Central America, are a menacing presence on street corners and parking lots. Residents have blamed them for crime, litter and declining property values.

There was an uproar three years ago after a nonprofit group opened a hiring center for them at Zuma Beach.

After much public Angst, the center closed last year, but revived two months ago at another location with the help of city and county officials. Even so, officials say, the opening of the new Malibu Labor Exchange Center was greeted by a flurry of nasty letters and telephone calls.

Last week, however, residents of Malibu’s exclusive Villa Costera area threw a party for some of the workers.

The reason: Neighbors say eight of the men at the center were instrumental in helping save their homes during the big fire.

“They were very heroic as far as we’re concerned,” said Mona Loo, a volunteer at the center whose home was among those the men are credited with helping save.

“We didn’t ask them to come and they weren’t even paid,” she said. “They just heard that my husband and I needed help. . . . And they ended up helping eight other families.”

Neighbors said several of the men worked through the day and night Nov. 2 and 3, often at great personal risk, digging trenches, cutting trees and stamping out embers with shovels and blankets once water to the area was cut off.

Among the party favors for the honorees: emergency flashlights, bandannas, backpacks and sweat shirts imprinted with “Bombero de Villa Costera.” Bombero, you might have guessed, is Spanish for firefighter.

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How does this day differ from all others?Mayor Richard Riordan declared last Thursday Mickey Mouse Day. He even did it with a more or less straight face. It was in honor of the Disney character’s 65th birthday.

City Council President John Ferraro had the tougher job: trying to restore some decorum to the chamber after council members and the audience sang “Happy Birthday.”

After several futile efforts to return to business, he finally said, “Can we have some quiet in here? We’re not running a Mickey Mouse operation.”

That really brought the laughs.

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Flipper meets Barney: The topiary dinosaurs that decorate Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade have gotten a new playmate--a life-sized bronze dolphin that seems to swim right out of the concrete.

The slick creature is more than a symbol of a new program aimed at making a dent in the Promenade’s panhandling problems. It is a functioning piggy bank into which folks who shrink from giving to beggars but who want to help the homeless can plop their coins.

The dolphin, sculpted by Peter Erlich, is part of a multimedia campaign dubbed CHANGE. It was devised by Mark Mawrence, who is on the board of the Bayside District, which runs the Promenade. With help donated by film professionals, Mawrence has come up with a public service announcement that will run in Mann Theaters.

The pitch is carefully worded to avoid criticizing nonaggressive panhandling, which is legal. It urges people to direct contributions to agencies that serve the homeless, where the money can be used for food, medical care, counseling and such. Money placed in the dolphin will also go to those agencies.

The new dolphin will soon be joined by two others, and smaller dolphin busts also will be placed in all the Promenade movie theaters.

Some panhandlers apparently are not happy about the new competitor on their turf. Bayside District President Robert D. Resnick said he was “feeding the dolphin” with a contribution one day recently when a homeless person approached him and “quite eloquently” argued that much of the money given to homeless agencies is eaten up by administrative costs.

Resnick vowed that the program will put nearly all of the money to good use.

Activist Jerry Rubin, who has adopted the homeless as his latest cause, was not satisfied.

“There are people sitting on the Promenade who are in need of money right now,” Rubin said, “not after you take it out of the dolphin.”

Anyone wanting to visit son of Flipper can find the sculpture on the south end of the kiosk in the block between Santa Monica Boulevard and Broadway.

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Had enough democracy yet?On the eve of yet another meeting on the Beverly Hills industrial area last week, some city planning commissioners were grumbling. The development plan that they had labored over for five years, through scores of public hearings and work sessions with city staff and residents, had been sent back for further review by the City Council.

Since 1988, the city has been trying to figure out what to do with a 43-acre section of public and private land bordered by Civic Center Drive, Beverly Boulevard, Maple Drive and the alley north of Burton Way.

The council was set to start making final decisions in April, but an alliance of civic and homeowner groups got the city to postpone hearings so they could further study the plan. In September, the group presented a “Vision Statement” that called for a 30-foot building height limit and a ban on nearly all new retail uses in the area. (The commission’s plan would allow some retail uses and, under certain circumstances, buildings up to 60 feet tall.)

The City Council’s response: It referred the industrial area plan back to the Planning Commission so differences could be reconciled.

“At the risk of making you angry,” Planning Commissioner Jerry Magnin told the council Tuesday, “I am not happy about this coming back.”

The council’s action “sends a very bad message (that) if you don’t like what’s happening, go complain and get it sent back for more (meetings),” Magnin said.

Commission Chairman Paul Selwyn added dryly that he thought 52 public meetings on the matter had provided “plenty of opportunity for public input.”

“I want to see this thing done as much as anyone,” City Manager Mark Scott replied. But “you have to get off the subject of process and address any issues that exist.”

The next hearing on the industrial area will be Dec. 14. Don’t bet on it being the last.

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The Santa Monica chain saw massacre: Santa Monica may endure as a hotbed of liberalism, but its protest-savvy population can be a tough audience at times.

Last Thursday, a contingent of environmental activists led by Greenpeace rushed GTE’s local headquarters, chanting the name of an old-growth forest in British Columbia and brandishing cardboard chain saws to protest clear-cutting there.

It was a raucous, impassioned display, but in a town where guerrilla theater is almost as common as high tide and the homeless, it drew little notice. While protesters made dying tree noises and collapsed onto the rug, GTE employees and customers went about their business.

“I’m just here to pay my bill,” one woman said.

Another customer joked with a clerk, “Why don’t you just disconnect their phones?”

Deeper inside the building, GTE officials took the affair a bit more seriously.

The company has come under criticism recently for purchasing wood pulp from MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., a Canadian logging concern that has clear-cut sections of the Clayoquot Sound ancient rain forest on Vancouver Island.

Environmentalists say the forest may be the last parcel of virgin timber in North America large enough to retain its original biodiversity. By GTE’s own estimate, 7% of the material used to produce its 15 million phone books in California each year comes from Clayoquot Sound.

But GTE spokeswoman Laura Volberding stressed in an interview that the wood pulp used in the phone books comes from scrap produced by logging that would occur anyway, and that the phone books are not “why they cut the timber down.”

Protesters, noting that GTE buys 650,000 tons of wood products a year from MacMillan Bloedel, nonetheless blamed the phone company for contributing to a cycle of environmental depredation. “It’s part of the profit equation,” said Atossa Soltani, of the Rainforest Action Network.

Actress Barbara Williams, wife of state Sen. Tom Hayden and a native of the Clayoquot Sound area, also attended the protest.

“They’re just stripping the forest,” she lamented.

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City Council meetings this week:

* Beverly Hills: no meeting. (310) 285-2400.

* Culver City: 7 p.m. Monday. Interim City Hall, 4095 Overland Ave. (310) 202-5851.

* Los Angeles: 10 a.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. 200 N. Spring St. (213) 485-3126.

* Malibu: 6:30 p.m. Monday. Hughes Laboratory, 3011 Malibu Canyon Road. (310) 456-2489.

* Santa Monica: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday. 1685 Main St. (310) 393-9975.

* West Hollywood: no meeting. (310) 854-7460.

Contributing to this week’s report were staff writers Nancy Hill-Holtzman, Ron Russell and Lee Harris, and correspondents G. Jeanette Avent and Jeff Kramer.