Smith leads Riggins by 78 votes in Malibu council race Play

Malibu's new city council member-elect may have some fence mending to do as a first item of business. Danny Smith is apparently unseating Marianne Riggins in the election a week ago.

Votes are still being counted as of Monday morning. Smith is now 78 votes ahead of Riggins. That's about one and a quarter percent.

Seventy-eight votes and an increasing margin is almost insurmountable, but about one-fifth of the ballots, 20%, have yet to be counted by the county. It is theoretically possible that some Malibu precincts have yet to be entered into the computer, and there still could be some weird election swing.

Probably not, though.

Danny Smith during the campaign had targeted a different city council member, Doug Stewart. There were some sharp attacks during the campaign.

Smith laid into Stewart during an appearance at the city council. The topic was a flap over city money allocations to the Malibu Fire Brigade — money that was actually usurped by an outside agency.

Here's Danny Smith speaking from the call to the public:

"When the misallocation and waste of brigade funding was recently brought to council's attention, you, Doug, in a rather defensive statement — perhaps realizing that you have egg on your face — you said that the city properly allocated funding to the 501c3 organization it had on file.

"Never mind the fact that in this very room you witnessed a procession, a substantial and recognizable portion of the Malibu Brigade, telling you those funds were going to be misspent and asking you for help.

"But what is worse, you have also told the community that future funds will continue to be allocated to the LAEPF until a settlement or other resolution is obtained.

"Are you out of your mind?"

We never heard Smith attack Riggins like that, at least not in the city council chambers — we didn't attend all of the debates, that would have been impossible time-wise.

And again, it wasn't Stewart who got ousted, it was Riggins. But Smith now finds himself sitting next to Doug Stewart on the city council platform. Stewart received 55 more votes than Smith in the election.

The defeat of Riggins removes from the Malibu City Council one of the strongest voices for the drive for an independent Malibu school district. A similar thing happened four years ago when Karen Farrer elected not to run for re-election.

Again, these results are preliminary and we still have 20% of the ballots left to be counted.