BRITTANY YEAROUT & DEMI JONES
Staff Writers
From Alaska to Panama, to the Far East and back to his home in Malibu, 70-year-old John Sibert has done everything from teaching at universities, traveling with the United States Marine Corps and consulting with the air and water pollution subcommittee of the U.S. Senate. He is now comfortably living at Point Dume with hopes of sitting on the Malibu City Council.
“This is where I am going to spend the rest of my life and since I am going to spend the rest of my life here I want to do what I can to make it better,” Sibert said.
The elections will be held April 8 where five people are running and only three positions are open. Sibert said he runs a positive campaign, respecting all his fellow candidates, but considers himself an “independent thinker that is not part of any group.”
Sibert has been on the Malibu Planning Commission for nearly six years and believes the primary problems in Malibu are development, fires, traffic, environment and education and recreation.
“On the Planning Commission what you learn is where our problems are and what problems need to be fixed,” Sibert said. “On the Planning Commission I had to act within the laws that exist not the ones I wish existed. As city council member you can start to fix the ones you wish existed.”
With three fires in the past year, Sibert said the approach to fires needs to be more aggressive. He recommends improving communication with surrounding cities, such as Agoura Hills, Calabasas and Westlake Village, adding more patrols for the Malibu Creek State Park, putting up early warning systems and updating technology within the fire department.
“We need to communicate better with the fire department,” Sibert said. “They have cell phones because the radios don’t work, so we need to look at buying GPS units which we can get for under a grand. They don’t know where they are going because they have old maps. These changes are minor, but it is an overall plan to deal with fires.”
Traffic is another long-term problem in Malibu. Approximately 31,000 trips are made on PCH daily, with only 14,000 people living in Malibu, meaning most of the traffic on PCH is thoroughfare, according to the Malibu Times.
If elected Sibert plans on meeting with Caltrans to synchronize traffic lights along the entire length of PCH, and working with developers such as the La Paz shopping center to build in traffic mitigation as part of their projects.
Also, to deal with this traffic, Sibert said the Malibu City Council needs to meet with all the property owners, including Pepperdine, and other surrounding jurisdictions.
“The City Council needs to do a better job at taking a full on view of all these issues,” Sibert said. “We have to look at all the different tools we need and figure out how we can apply those to solve the problems. We need to spend more time connecting outside of the city of Malibu because 14,000 people can’t do it alone.”
Along with serving as a member of the air and water pollution subcommittee of the U.S. Senate, Sibert is a founding board member of Save Our Coast and the Costal Services Center. He also does his part in Malibu by cleaning beaches once a week and proposed the ban on plastic bans in the city of Malibu, which will take effect this summer.
“Malibu’s concern is so much a function of the demographics of who you are talking to. There is no one concern for Malibu. However, if maybe there is one concern I think everybody in Malibu agrees about it, is keeping the environment clean.”
Although not all students will be voting in the next Malibu City Council elections, Sibert wants to remind them of the impact they have on the community.
“It is important to students because they live in the same environment, they are only going to be here for four or five years, but they are living in this city and using this city’s businesses and facilities, have to deal with this traffic, and use this ocean,” Sibert said. “So they ought to care about what the people in the city of Malibu are trying to do to keep it clean.”
04-03-2008
