=.  Street racers … crashes … Cross Creek jammed … another windy weekend in Malibu.

=.  Do not send your kid to a Covid party … says the school superintendent.

=.  Fox News goes after Webster school for teaching that black lives matter.

=.  SCE raised its rates … and CPA had a billing snafu … and power bills are astronomical.

=.  What to do if you get a double bill.

=.  And now it’s up to the U S Senate to protect sea life … and ban the nets that vacuum every living thing out of the ocean. 

This is Malibu’s Only Local Daily News … the Monday edition … I’m Hans Laetz reporting. 

6 Days Of Hot, Dry Winds Forecast For Malibu

Speed Racer Weekend – ‘Never Been This Bad’

Street racers returned to Malibu over the weekend.

Pacific Coast Highway was taken over by loud cars and bad drivers… particularly Friday night and early Saturday morning. 

Long-time residents of Eastern Malibu said they have never heard it this bad.

Cross Creek Road was jammed with car show enthusiasts …. Again… One informed the expert said it was the worst he’s ever seen.

And they were crashes.

At 4:45 Sunday afternoon … a serious crash at Rambla Vista at PCH … the intersection with the most crashes in Malibu. 

One person was helicoptered out from the Pepperdine lawn.

At around 7:30 last night …. PCH was closed for a time at Carbon Canyon.

There … sheriff’s deputies untangled a car versus motorcycle crash.

All this in the middle of huge crowds.

Yesterday’s 75° weather brought tens of thousands of people to Malibu.

Cold winter water temperatures kept almost everyone out of the water,

The water is as flat as can be.

No water rescues were reported by lifeguards. 

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SMMUSD Chief: ‘Do Not Send Your Kid To A Covid Party’

No …. do not send your kid to a covid party … to try to get the little one infected with the disease.

That’s the latest rumor control message from Santa Monica-Malibu school board superintendent Ben Drati.

At last Thursday’s school board meeting … Drati swatted down the rumor the an intentional Covid 19 infection for a kid might be a good idea.

The school’s nurses were pretty upset when they heard that rumor making the rounds among some parents …. Drati told the school board last Thursday.

He said … quote … “Obviously that is completely inaccurate. I just wanted to verify that, but, in fact, it was pretty upsetting [to] our nurses. They were pretty upset by that allegation.”

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Good news on the Covid front … in local hospitals.

The number of COVID-positive patients in Los Angeles County hospitals has plunged below 3,000 for the first time in weeks.

2,841 were in the hospitals Sunday …  according to the latest state numbers.

Hospitalization numbers hit a peak of more than 4,800 in mid-January. 

Once that number gets below 25 hundred … and stays there for a week … mask rules will be dropped by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

On Sunday … 65 additional deaths associated with COVID-19 were added to the tally.

The department reported 85 COVID-related deaths on Friday, and 84 on Saturday.As of 

Vaccination levels in LA County are pretty high … but not so for boosters.

82% of eligible county residents aged 5 and older have received at least one dose of vaccine.

73% are have had full vaccinations.  and 34% are vaccinated and boosted. 

Children between 5 and 11 still have the lowest vaccine rates, with just 32% having received one dose and 23% fully vaccinated.

Children aged 5 to 11 represented 9 percent ion the population … but15% of all COVID cases

Teens aged 12 to 17 accounted for 7 percent of the population … and 13% of all cases, 

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Support for KBUU Radio comes from the Malibu Foundation.

The Malibu Foundation underwrote the KBUU solar panels and batteries at the transmitter … which keeps KBUU’s FM transmitting on 99.1 during storms and blackouts… 24 seven… on clean renewable Malibu sunshine.

Three Factors Converge To Supercharge Malibu Power Bills 

Skyrocketing power bills are hitting Malibu area residents hard.

The reasons?

A major mistake by two power companies that generate electricity and deliver it.

A change by Southern California Edison in the hours for off-peak billing.

And mixed in … an increase in SCE rates to pay for hardening the power system against fires.

First … there is the billing cycle mistake made by Southern California Edison and the clean power alliance. 

KBUU news has learned that as many as 145,000 customers got their January bill with a major mistake… 

SCE had included in the bills its SCE delivery charges… but not clean power alliances generation costs for the month of December. 

Without notice… SCE added the December generation cost under the bill for the following month… February.

Then … SCE last December shifted the hours when it delivers cheap electricity … 

The super-peak hours now start later at night … and end earlier in the afternoon. 

This appears to hit some people very hard… particularly those with electric cars or swimming pool filters or some other power intensive uses that may need to have their hours reset.

Then…on top of all of that… Southern California Edison has had two recent great hikes for its delivery charges… To pay for hardening the powerlines against strong winds and potential brushfires. Just exactly how much those rate hikes are… And whether they are being calculated correctly… is something we can’t tell you.

We’ve asked the California public utilities commission… and their official response was rates have gone up.

Terrie Propser … the CPUC spokeswoman … says Edison was allowed to raise its rates by about 65 million dollars to pay for liability insurance … electric distribution costs ,.. extreme weather events and summer reliability.

But 65 million dollars total … spread out among the Edison customer base …. would work out to less than 10 dollars per Edison customer per month.

Not the hundreds of dollars per month that we are seeing now.

Something else has gone wrong … and the billing cycle fiasco does not exactly instill confidence in the SCE billing computers.

We’ve had no comment yet from Edison.

The state’s news media have not yet discovered the issue … so far it has been reported only locally here in Malibu.

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So what to do if you have been hit with a gigantic power bill?

Call your power generation company … in most cases … that would be CPA.

Ask them if you were charged for power generation for both December and January on the bill you just got. 

CPA says they will set up installment payments for the delayed billing cycle demand.

And CPA says it will refund your money if your bill went up because you got shifted to one of their time of use rates and your bill went up as a result of that.

But much of that increase may be imposed by SCE … upon CPA customers … to make up for higher SCE distribution costs.

Ratepayers may be getting a bitter dose of the unforeseen costs of climate change on the local power grid. 

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You are listening to the latest news from Radio Malibu.

Support for KBUU’s radio covers from Orbit Homes Inc. 

Prefabricated homes are the future of construction. Easy to get permits. Fast to build and install. Cost effective … little construction waste. 

In Malibu, Orbit Homes has a showroom between City Hall and the Malibu racquet club.

Fire victims can check them out in person … and visit them on the web at www.orbithomes.us .

Webster Parent Launches SMMUSD Onto Fox News Outrage Treadmill

Malibu is in the middle of a brewing crapstorm over at Fox News Channel… as the latest outrage of the day for Fox and Friends is at Malibu’s Webster Elementary School and the Santa Monica-Malibu school district.

Fox is trumpeting a letter from the father of a Webster school student … upset that his child has been exposed to a week of racial equity lessons based on Black Lives Matter efforts.

A Webster school parent sent an email to the district … which has bow ben picked up by Fox and friends. 

The Malibu parent argues that Black Lives Matter is “unequivocally a racist political movement that goes against many of our family values.”

He says … quote … “We are not a racist family. We are a Jewish family. We are a family of immigrants that came from Poland, Greece, Russia and Spain,” he wrote in the email to SMMUSD’s school board members.

“I am not going to allow this group of pretenders to have any part in my child’s education. I’m hoping that the information I’ve received is untrue.”

The district has adopted a Black Lives Matter campaign … that does not necessarily use the language of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Black Lives Matter Week of Action  is celebrated during the first week of February by the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District.

This started two years ago … when two Santa Monica High School graduates said they had  witnessed stereotyping and prejudice at school.

Malibu High School was also investigated when a hangman’s noose was found in a boys locker room several years ago.
The controversy has just cropped up on Fox News …. The district has not respo0nded. 

We will keep you posted. 

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Malibu Brewing Company is a locally owned craft brewery, proudly supporting our community, and local public radio. 

Just released: a limited, holiday-spiced Winter Ale …  a perfect fireside companion.

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US House Approves Drift Gillnet Ban, Only 4 SoCal Fishing Boats Still Sweeping With Them

Drift gillnets are still used sometimes off the coast of Southern California to sweep the ocean clean of anything swimming in it. 

The nets can be a mile long… they’re nearly invisible… and they sift out and kill everything from the surface to the bottom when employed by commercial fisherman off the coast.

Marine mammals … sea turtles … and dozens of varieties of fish that are not desirable or too small to sell are killed by these nets. 

But they also catch swordfish … valuable. 

Ben Enticknap is pacific director for Oceana.

NEWSCART A73026  DRIFTNETS 111 BEN ENTICKNAP 

“They are set at night in the epicenter of ocean wildlife … the coast of Southern California … to catch swordfish. But they also catch whales dolphins turtles sharks and many many other animals.”

California has been trying to phase these drift gillnets out… by offering cash to fishing boats who turn in their gillnets … and banning the use of new gillnets.

Now … Congress is taking action to ban drift gill nets in the waters further than three miles offshore.

A trade bill aimed at China … and protecting the US computer chip industry … has a rider on it that would phase out drift gill nets in federal waters.

The semiconductor protection bill was passed by the House … and now goes to the Senate.

At Oceana … Ben Enticknap notes the bill would ban the sale of shark fins in the United States.

NEWSCART A73025 DRIFTNETS BEN ENTICKNAP 222

“We’ve already prohibited shark fins in California and Oregon and Washington and this kind of takes that same approach and makes it and we’ve already prohibited shark fins in California and Oregon and Washington … and this kind of takes that same approach and makes it national.”

The Oceana spokesman was talking with the California News Service … which did the reporting on this story.

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You can hear the news live every morning until 9:30 on KBUU.

FM 99.1 in western Malibu.  Also: streaming at www.radiomalibu.net

Between 10 and 2 … you can hear the newscast playback loop on KBU2. That’s on FM 99.1 HD2 in your car, or streaming at s7.viastreaming.net/6500

If humanly possible, the KBUU NewsScript is usually published at around midday at www.radiomalibu.net