🌊 The Malibu Current with Councilmember Haylynn Conrad

📅 May 12, 2026

Dear Malibu,

Tonight in Topanga, a group of neighbors will spend two hours at Fair Hills Farm learning how to evacuate horses and large animals when fire moves fast. That kind of room, on a Tuesday night, in a barn, is where this community quietly gets safer. Last night the Council met at City Hall, last week our skate park hosted one of the most influential figures in modern skateboarding, and a few months after the loss of a young driver on Malibu Canyon, the conversation about road safety is still painfully relevant. Here is the week worth knowing.

🐴 Tonight at Fair Hills Farm: Emergency Evacuation for Horse & Large Animal Owners

🔹 Tuesday, May 12, 6:30 to 8:30 PM at Fair Hills Farm in Topanga: If you keep horses or large animals in Topanga or Malibu, this is the meeting to be at tonight. Fair Hills Farm is at 2735 Santa Maria Road, Topanga, CA 90290. The agenda walks through evacuation protocols, coordination with Animal Care and Control, Pierce College shelter operations, trailer and documentation readiness, and the community network that makes the difference when there is no time to figure things out from scratch.

→ 🐎 Why this matters here: Anyone who has animals in these hills knows that life changes the moment a Red Flag goes up. Trailers, halters, paperwork, evacuation contacts, a shelter destination, a neighbor with capacity to help. The plan has to exist before the alert comes in, not after. Tonight's meeting is exactly the kind of preparation our animals deserve from us, and exactly the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor coordination that has kept this community standing through more than its share of bad fire years.

→ 🎯 My take: Seventeen years of raising my kids in Malibu has included horses, AYSO fields, the ocean, and a deep awareness of what fire season can do here. I will be at Fair Hills Farm tonight, and I hope to see many of you there. Please RSVP with Róisín O'Brien at 818-640-5318 so the organizers know to plan for you.

👉 View the meeting details and RSVP info

🏛️ This Week at City Hall

🔹 Last night's Regular City Council Meeting wrapped up at City Hall: The Council gaveled in at 5:30 PM on Monday, May 11. Public participation is the part of these meetings that matters most to me, so if you were one of the residents who showed up or wrote in, thank you. For anyone who could not be there, the full agenda and meeting materials remain available through the city's Agenda Center, and the recording typically posts within a few days.

👉 View the May 11 agenda and meeting materials

🔹 Two more commission meetings still on the calendar this week: The Harry Barovsky Memorial Youth Commission meets Thursday, May 14 from 7:00 to 8:00 PM at City Hall, and looking just ahead, the Planning Commission returns next Monday, May 18 at 6:30 PM. The Youth Commission room is one of the most underappreciated in city government. Decisions about programs, safety, and engagement that touch our young people often get shaped first by the young people themselves around that table. I’d love for the Commission election to have a council debate for the city election in November.

👉 Browse the full commission calendar

🛡️ Road Safety: After Hunter Langley

🔹 A painful time later, the truth this tragedy revealed has not gotten any easier to sit with:  since the community lost a young Sierra Canyon driver in a crash on Malibu Canyon Road. Time does not soften what that loss revealed about roads we use every day. Malibu Canyon and PCH are scenic, and they are dangerous. The combination of speed, sight lines, weather, and traffic patterns we live with here is not abstract. It shows up in numbers our community has been forced to live with for far too long.

→ ⚡ Why this stays on the agenda: Sixty-one lives lost on Malibu roads over the years is not a statistic to me. It is the reason traffic safety, illegal parking, and infrastructure investment will keep showing up on this newsletter and in the rooms where decisions get made. We owe families a city that treats road safety as a baseline expectation, not a wish list.

→ 🎯 What I am pushing on: Better engineering and protection on the most dangerous stretches, stronger coordination with the agencies that share jurisdiction with us on PCH and the canyons, and a public conversation that does not wait for the next loss to start again. If you have a road safety concern in your neighborhood, please send it in. The specifics make the case.

👉 Share a road safety concern with Council

🛹 Last Week's Rodney Mullen Events: A Quiet Win for Our Kids

🔹 Rodney Mullen brought the Malibu Library Speaker Series to a full house on Wednesday, May 6, and spent the afternoon with our young skaters at Malibu Skate Park: For anyone who missed the context, Rodney Mullen is the world champion skateboarder credited with inventing many of the foundational tricks of the modern sport. His work also crosses into MIT's Media Lab and the Smithsonian. The 4:00 PM youth skate session at Malibu Bluffs Park gave local kids time with a global figure on a Wednesday afternoon. The 7:00 PM lecture at City Hall reached full capacity well before the event.

→ 💡 Why programming like this matters in a small city: A library speaker series that can pull a name like Rodney Mullen tells our young people that the world they are dreaming about is closer than they think. That is not a small thing. To everyone who showed up, to the city staff who pulled it off, and to Rodney for sharing his time with our community, thank you.

👉 Read about the speaker series

🥾California Trails Survey:   

 https://www.myinput.com/californiatrailssurvey

WE ALL LOVE OUR HIKING TRAILS THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO HAVE A VOICE IN THE STATE PARKS TRAILS. CLICK ON THE LINK ABOVE AND FILL OUT THIS IMPORTANT SURVEY

📅 Dates to Know

🔹 Tuesday, May 12, 6:30 to 8:30 PM: Emergency Evacuation Meeting for Horse and Large Animal Owners, Fair Hills Farm, 2735 Santa Maria Road, Topanga (tonight)

🔹 Wednesday, May 13, 6:30 to 7:30 PM: Malibu Monarch Project Lecture Series, Malibu City Hall Multi-Purpose Room

🔹 Thursday, May 14, 4:30 to 5:30 PM and 6:00 to 7:00 PM: Free Community Fire Extinguisher Trainings, Malibu City Hall

🔹 Thursday, May 14, 7:00 to 8:00 PM: Harry Barovsky Memorial Youth Commission Regular Meeting, Malibu City Hall Multi-Purpose Room

🔹 Saturday, May 16, 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM: 2nd Annual Fire Safe Festival, Wildfire Learning Center at the Malibu Forestry Unit, 942 Las Virgenes Road

🔹 Saturday, May 16, 12:00 to 3:00 PM: Poetry Summit "Vibrant Cycles," Malibu City Hall

      Saturday, May 16, 12PM: Palibu Chamber Recovery Expo(free event): Palibu Chamber Recovery Expo Tickets, Saturday, May 16  •  12 PM - 4 PM | Eventbrite 

🔹 Sunday, May 17, 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM: Legacy Park Art Walk with the Malibu Art Association, Legacy Park

🔹 Monday, May 18, 6:30 PM: Regular Planning Commission Meeting, Malibu City Hall

Monday, May 18th, 6:30pm SMMC - Meeting Agenda: (to participate remotely, please consult page 1 of the agenda)

     Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy & Advisory Committee - May 18 2026 - Agenda - Html 

🔹 Tuesday, May 19, 6:30 to 8:30 PM: Parks and Recreation Commission Regular Meeting, Malibu City Hall Multi-Purpose Room

🔹 Monday, May 25: Memorial Day. A moment to remember and honor those who gave their lives in service to this country.

👉 Browse the full Malibu commission calendar

🐝 One Last Thought

The issues I keep returning to, fire preparedness, road safety, animals, our kids, the small businesses that hold the community together, they all share the same starting line. Someone has to be in the room. Tonight in a barn in Topanga, neighbors are showing up for their animals. Last week at the skate park, our city showed up for our kids. Last night at City Hall, residents showed up for the agenda. The work of keeping this place safe and worth living in is built out of those rooms, every single week.

If something in this newsletter sparked a question or a thought you want me to hear, please write to me at hconrad@malibucity.org. And if you know someone who should be reading these, please forward it their way. Follow Haylynn Conrad on Instagram

See you out there, Malibu.