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From Paul Shoop, a retired attorney who lives in “an enclave of multimillion-dollar homes off curving Malibu Canyon Road,” on the LA water board’s proposal to ban septic tanks and install a modern sewer system in Malibu:

It’s like living in a Third World country not to have sewers. But nobody wants to pay that sort of exorbitant fee. If we need a sewer system, you expect government to provide that service.

Quite so.  Municipal services should appear magically for wealthy communities like Malibu.

Of course, the proposed fee for the new sewer system really is pretty exorbitant.  But a big part of the reason for that is because Malibu is so sparsely settled, which means the cost of the system gets divided up among a small number of homeowners.  And why is Malibu so sparsely settled?  Because the current wealthy homeowners like it that way.  Apparently they just don’t like paying the price.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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