Why No Comments Here?

THIS

xkcd internet classic "Duty Calls"

Fact Checking: Gaspar the Empty Boast

From the crack fact-checking team at EYNU and Our Mayor . . . We watch hours of videos and comb minutes so you don't have to do it.  We should embed a donation button.

A review of email responses to Deputy Mayor Gaspar's claim that she didn't have anyone approach her with sustainability concerns.  Our research follows each of Gaspar's boasts claims - in bright green.

Note how often she falsely promotes Mayor Stocks as the person who initiates environmental agenda items.
Dear [public];

I thank you for your recent email regarding positive environmental policies.  I share your views as does the Council, who have voted unanimously on numerous environmental issues to protect or improve the conditions in Encinitas. During the past year and a half this includes, but is not limited to:

• Environmental Action Plan- I led the discussion and developed consensus on a plan which included objective measures, so that staff could deliver maximum results for the taxpayer dollars. This plan passed unanimously, including aye votes from Maggie Houlihan and Teresa Barth.  July 20, 2011 

At the Feb. 16, 2011, Councilwoman Barth made the motion, and Maggie Houlihan supported it, to approve the Action Plan as presented by the Commission. Jerome Stocks was particularly insulting to Elizabeth Taylor, the commission chair who made the presentation. 

Barth withdrew the motion and requested the item be brought back at a later date for additional discussion. At the July 20, 2011, Gaspar proposed eliminating many of the stronger proposals preferring minimal compliance.  Houlihan and Barth were able to include some items previously eliminated creating a compromise (admittedly weak but better than the complete gutting) that we could all support. (see minutes  listed in the Aug. 17 meeting)

• Solar Panels- The Council voted unanimously, including Councilmember Muir, to oppose SDGE's unfair rate hikes on users of solar panels, who actually provide all citizens a benefit by producing more energy than they expend. Jan. 11, 2012  

At the Nov. 16, 2011 meeting, Barth asked to have the issue SDG&E’s proposed solar users rate changes be placed on a future agenda. On Jan. 11, 2012  the issue was discussed with local solar companies and numerous public speakers  asking the council to send a letter of opposition. Encinitas was one of many cities and thousands of rate payers that opposed the hike. 

• Electric Car charging station- I proposed that the city reduce or waive the fees for installing these stations before I was elected to Council. Recently, Mayor Jerome Stocks put this item on the agenda and it passed unanimously.  

Electric car charging stations: the one located in Encinitas is part of a state-wide effort and is a joint project with the city. No fees would have been charged to install this station. The recommendation to reduce or waive permit fees to install home solar panels and charging stations was a prior recommendation of the Environmental Commission. ...can’t find the meeting urgh. It was also already common practice in other cities. 

• Farmers Market- Approved unanimously (5-0) after being put on the agenda by the Mayor and City Manager. 

The Farmers Market issue was brought to the council on Feb. 15, 2012 by the Planning Dept. as they were recommending that the city charge a fee to use the public parking lot. Gaspar pursued an aggressive line of questioning if those fees were set high enough.  The agenda item was NOT initiated by the Mayor only a procedural requirement.

• General Plan- Since my election, I have worked harder than any other Councilmember to oppose increasing density along the El Camino Real and Encinitas Blvd corridors. I asked the Council to join me in declaring the land use and housing element of the General Plan officially 'dead'. Again, consensus was developed in a 5-0 vote, and I continue my persistent efforts to make sure those elements do not reappear. 

At the July 18, 2012 council meeting Kristin said staff could use both the Housing Element and Land Use element along with all other elements of the draft General Plan for reference, excepting only the proposals for El Camino Real corridor, Encinitas Blvd. & Santa Fe Dr, when the staff  creates a new draft document. Sounds like she partially resurrected both elements. 

• Protecting natural wetlands- The council supported staff's rejection of a recent Caltrans proposal to enlarge the Interstate 5 ramps at Encinitas Blvd, which would have destroyed a protected wetland. 

Staff and Caltrans have been working on these plans for years. At the Aug. 15, 2012 meeting, Tony Kranz asked why there was not going to be a four-leaf clover design at Encinitas Blvd. The Mayor noted that the area just east of the off ramp was classified as wetlands and Caltrans did not want the extra expense of mitigation. 

The interchange is a Caltrans project and the city council has no authority to approve it or not. At the same meeting, Jerome Stocks mockingly described the area as a wetland...he certainly didn’t sound like he thought the area was worth protecting.  In fact, both Jerome and Kristin were on record supporting Caltrans proposal to widen I-5 significantly through Encinitas. 

Though we have accomplished a lot we can still do more.  We continue to retain the services of an environmental consultant who is pursuing further environmental improvements with the Environmental Commission, at the unanimous direction of the Council.

Please feel free to make an appointment to meet with me at City Hall to address any further concerns you might have.  I do realize that this is an election year and I choose to address citizens concerns in the open, instead of leading from behind.  Misconstruing the voting record and/or views of fellow council members, as Council Member Barth did in her recent email, is counterproductive and is certainly not the best  way to generate a consensus for positive environmental changes.

I thank you for your positive advocacy which is a big part of why Encinitas is such a great place to live!

Best in health and happiness,
Deputy Mayor, Kristin Gaspar

Admittedly, this much immersion in this amount of horse pucky makes us want to scream. *Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire! they scream as they run outside to clear their brains*

Truthiness Team's Environmental Lite

New feature at Our Mayor based on the tendency for the council majority take a nugget of truth from a gravel strewn, meandering dirt path towards their own personal and political agendas and hold it up like a prize. Little factoids can be found and spun into stories to delight backers and base. 

Truth is, Stocks and his dance partner Gaspar do not advocate for a smarter, greener Encinitas to be a leader in low-carbon, low-water and low-waste policies and practices. For several years the showboating for solar panels and charging stations (great options) and his shiny Nissan Leaf is about ostentatious toys for the "I'll show you mine, it's bigger than yours" club.

Conservation, innovation and alternatives? Not so much. Marketing is the whole package. Stocks' cluelessness can be astounding.  Salting the earth?  Not to worry. Round-up? It's safe. The goal appears to be keeping expectations as low as possible, no risks, no local funding, demand nothing of developers, ignore several years of study and keep mouthing truthiness. By all means don't ponder the future and the realities that lie ahead.

This meeting was a little over a year ago and five months after Gaspar (in a more scripted, word-filler version than Stocks) all but killed the Environmental Work Plan that had been in the works for a couple of years and intended to be a work in progress guide.  They did achieve their goal of putting crony Alice Jacobs, unquestionably the most unqualified candidate ever to apply on the Environmental Commission. Only having the presence of Teresa Barth and Maggie Houlihan helped salvage some of the Environmental Commission's resolutions.  Here, in the July 2011 meeting she asserts the victory of a "shell" plan like it is a point of pride. This past week it appeared more stalling and deconstructing were the goals in rejecting the staff / commission recommendation.

It is particularly prescient though for being a precursor to the gutting, killing and reworking the General Plan Update to her overlords' specifications. As much as the public and Councilwoman Barth, candidates Shaffer and Kranz have acknowledged genuine concerns from the community regarding their right to have input - the right to address development - we question Gaspar's motives and processes.  Most salient to the red herring of funding concerns above we will continue to ask the question, how much has it cost to gut years of staff time work, workshop expenses, inventing new groups and staff time to implement?  Who's driving and where are they headed? 

Neither Stocks or Gaspar have offered any vision for the future for Encinitas environment, land use, housing, traffic or much else.  Truthiness - for backers and base to fill in the blanks or the completely uninformed to nod at smiling words that sound like something. 

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." Stephen Colbert

Word Games - Affordable Housing

April 2, 2008
During the months long futile exercise in a Mobile Home Study which touted the notion of supporting mobile home residents against predator practices like the Sands Mobile Home Park Conversion, the chambers were repeatedly packed with public speakers passionate about needing security for their housing. At one such meeting Richard Bintliff thought he had a solution.

Stocks Mocks™ - as he does - and squashed that pretty thoroughly.

Myths Encinitas

Encinitas has all of the makings to be a creative leader in 21st century measures for resiliency in our natural environment.  The citizenry is leading this effort, the minority voices on the council have long advocated for this and the majority are content to do the minimum and reap the recognition.  Greenwashing is ubiquitous in the power that comes from extraction where profits and private property rights (read: wealth) above all else crew that is or council majority.

Across the nation, across party lines the people are pushing the leaders from the ground up to prioritize the health of the people and the natural world. Clean air, clean and abundant water, less waste, eliminating pesticides, safe food, less carbon and so many other things have touched households - often starting with the children.

It is a myth that doing the bare minimum as a leader means you can call yourself an advocate for the environment.  Case in point is Kristin Gaspar who championed the council majority vote to decimate the environmental work plan that had been created by the Environmental Commission over two years, voted along with the majority for crony on the Environmental Commission over highly qualified applicants, argued for the downtown Farmer's Market to pay higher fees, overturned staff's plans to have General Plan update plans available at the Leucadia Farmer's Market and had a good laugh over safe food issues with her kids drinking juice.  For all her proselytizing from the dais, she has yet to mention climate change realities behind the General Plan Update.  By politicizing density as the only issue, she fosters confusion and fear. This is a smattering of how anti-leadership works with constituents who are misinformed, afraid or simply unaware.

We offer this more recent summary from last Wednesday's meeting:

Agenda item 4 has this in the staff report as background:   "On July 20, 2011, the City Council approved the City’s first Environmental Action Plan designating sixteen key environmental enhancement areas on which to focus. One specific work area was: “Seek recognition through the Institute for Local Government’s Beacon Awards for Encinitas’ current and ongoing efforts to promote sustainability, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, conserve resources and save energy.”"

Staff was doing what Council had asked, and following through on the Environmental Action Plan.  Unfortunately, Donna Westbrook pulled the item from the consent agenda and made a speech about property rights and how participation in this program means forcing people to all live close together and give up their cars and ride bikes everywhere (said very disparagingly) and eliminate parking and follow an international conspiracy, etc. etc. etc.

Instead of dismissing her comments, there were questions from Council about why we are doing this.  Kristin said that she doesn't hear from people that they want sustainability principles applied and she asked why we are "forcing this" upon our community - people like Encinitas the way it is so why do we need to change.

In a later discussion, Kristin squashed a resolution that would ask the Encinitas rep to the California League of Cities (Jim Bond) to go along with the League's recommended position "The fourth proposed resolution requests consideration of suspension or revision of the California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32 of 2006). The City Council has adopted an Environmental Policy and a Climate Action Plan that are both responsive to and consistent with AB 32 goals of greenhouse gas reduction. Staff recommends a “Disapprove” vote on this resolution." and instead gives Bond instruction to "vote his conscience". We can only assume what his conscience will tell him!

Again there were comments from the Council that they don't hear from citizens about environmental issues or a desire to address sustainability. So if we want our elected officials to represent us and our views, we need to speak up and hold them accountable. How shameful to have us backing down from an already weak Environmental Action plan.

We BILKED This - Begins Monday

Happy Anniversary to the Women of the US of A - 92 years of having the vote.

This doesn't mean we have rights.  There is a certain party that would deny women rights over their own bodies. This has been a war on women for forty years. If every woman in the US of A who could vote, would vote we would see a country transformed. 

Hat Tip to Truthdig's Mr. Fish and Emma's Revolution and the Renegade Raging Grannies.

Muir Hits the Ground

The recent article on Mark Muir beginning his campaign had a line that jumped out.

Muir’s experience with various local agencies allowed him to hit the ground running when he began his Council term, he said.

Why this line?  The image that asserted itself is of Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall, hitting the ground and running - running yolk that is.

Why Humpty Dumpty you might fairly ask? The answer is straightforward.  Muir always has and always will, for one blogger here, trigger the Beatles lyrics for him and his cronies with their brittle shells,

"I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.

I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob."

Why the vast unknown?  Just like this vapid article quotes empty phrases, at council meetings Muir uses these kinds of phases and buzz words like best practices, re-examine criteria, look at different methodologies, etc. What the hell does he mean?  And self describing himself as a fiscal conservative or government efficiency fighter should send the hypocrisy meter into critical zone. Yes, let's have a deep and hearty laugh over Mark protecting the public purse from overly generous pension benefits. He says, 

“I almost kind of put myself in a position like (San Diego Mayor) Jerry Sanders, (when) you’re part of that pension thing,” Muir said. “And now you’re fighting the pension thing because you’re in a different role.”

Mark Muir could never be accused of being articulate.  But, even simple sentences could link a series of empty phrases to describe a world view, a belief system an overarching goal. With this candidate there is nothing.

And that brings this back to "I am a Walrus" lyrics. When John Lennin was interviewed he admitted that the whole string of unrelated phrases didn't mean anything, they meant NOTHING.  He'd joked, let them try to figure out what this means. 

You can play along at home, Mark Muir's campaign statement has sustainability in it.  Did you find any reference to sustainability in the article cited here? No, you will not find it as Mark must have belatedly gotten the Gaspar/Westbrook/Andreen memo on sustainability.

Nothing to see here people, move along. 

Misinformation Minute Launch

The August 22 meeting of the City Council was filled with the usual fact bending, staged exchanges, history revisionism, false assumptions, insubstantial staff reports, outright lies and other standard fare.  Sitting through these without feeling frustration and anger is difficult.  Culling through it all again to capture clips feels like punishment.  So today the clips below capture the essense of falsehoods in a minute.  For seasoned council watchers little more is needed, for people new to the scene it's a taste.

 Whoops! Forgot one (posted 11:52 am)

No Comment

See Encinitas You Need Us blog for more factual information on these subjects.

Cardiffian Matriarch - Dorthea Patricia Smith

This remarkable woman is remembered in a piece submitted by her family to Encinitas Patch, including this vibrant picture by Michelle Haymoz.

Encinitas history is writ large in this memorial to Dorthea Patricia Smith and well worth reading.

"Dorothea Patricia Smith: A Creative Life. She encouraged us to live boldly, paint large, make music, and put our hands in dirt. To stretch the envelope into another space. To reject crawling into a hole with work. To paint big pictures of color and put them up on your walls. To get out and do things, have picnics, enjoy all the seasons, go exploring. Most importantly, to dream big."

Her love of architectural was especially fascinating with her sharp perception of utility and flow. Dorthea and her husband Milton had four children.  In looking through the archives here it seems we have posted a video clip that included her daughter Tricia speaking out against the proposed developer's agreement for the agricultural property owned by the Brown family of flower growers.  The Smith Family, Dorthea's parents, grew flowers too.

"Her parents grew gladiolas commercially on rented land throughout Cardiff and Encinitas. Flowers remained popular during the Depression for weddings and funerals, and when the flower crop was good and the demand high at the Los Angeles flower market the family frequently sold out every last organic flower. However, the year Dorothea was planning to attend college at UCLA, 1935, a devastating freeze wiped out the flower crop. She stayed home to work and help the family, and consequently did not attend college."

This adds a textural background to the video clip of her daughter's points five years ago at city hall.  Given her mother's keen design interests, the construction business and the family legacy in the flower fields, she speaks with real authenticity about quality in development the landowners and how they should not be pitied for their changing circumstances.  They have extracted a great deal and have enjoyed many breaks and benefits.  The arguments are as current today as they were in 2007.

It was just last week we highlighted another Cardiffian, Chalmers Johnson, though this one was known by a tiny proportion within his community and by a larger group outside Encinitas.

According to Mary: Transparency

Rustle the Leaf Sounds Like Russell Levan

This cartoon from the California Student Sustainability Coalition was startlingly similar in message to what Leucadian Russell Levan (aka Goathead Thorn Warrior) said at the last (8/15/12) City Council meeting during Oral Communications (essentially the 15 minute open mike portion of each meeting).

Contaminated Soils - Hymettus Neighbors

Neighbors from Hymettus last spoke on the very first meeting of this year.  It was the third time they approached the city council majority to try and seek answers, support . . . justice. (The original presentation from representatives of this Hymettus neighborhood complaining about the failure of soil remediation processes in the construction on a former agricultural land can be seen from May 2011.)

For the record, the city council and staff responses and statements from this January 2012 are included here.

They were promised that their request would be agendized.  As Russell Levan pointed out, it has been eight months. Where is the agenda item, where is the San Diego County Department of Environmental Health?

Plastic Bags

As Councilwoman Barth stated, she participated in the recent press conference regarding the bag ban legislation that Russell was urging people to support. Read the Union Tribune coverage here - behind the shiny new pay wall.  

Her newsletter contained the following, 

"I was honored to be asked to participate with a coalition of environmental advocates, elected officials and grocery store representatives  to announce our support for a statewide prohibition on plastic bags. Assembly Bill 298, was co-authored by Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, pictured above in the white shirt.  I was happy to report on the success of Encinitas' Day Without a Bag public outreach and education program.  Solana Beach council members Lesa Heebner & Dave Roberts spoke about the plastic bag ban ordinance recently adopted in Solana Beach."

Myths Encinitas

The most magical mythical thing for Our Mayor Stocks is that he is a legend in his own mind.  The last council meeting was a robust display of his smug arrogance as holder of all knowledge necessary to a public hearing on the Crest Drive appeal shown in this clip, from yesterday's post, (Eddie Haskell character being a variation on the arrogance described in today's post).

For today's Myths Encinitas this tendency will be hereby called, Stocksplaining based on this definition where "person in authority position" is the position of privilege:

Splaining—[Privilege]splaining is when a person of privilege condescendingly tells an unprivileged person something [he or she] already knows, particularly something about [one's] own life and/or identity, e.g. a man mansplaining what it's like to be a woman to a woman. [Privilege]splaining is that delightful mixture of privilege and ignorance that leads to condescending, inaccurate explanations, delivered with the rock-solid conviction of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course [the privileged person] is right, because [he or she is the privileged person] in this conversation."

It would be difficult to cull through all of the videos clips of Jerome Stocks, even when he wasn't sitting in the mayor chair, and find one where he isn't Stocksplaining something to someone.  But this last clip is particularly interesting because his Stocksplaining to James Bond enraged Bond who has spent 20 years on the council and was mayor 4 or 5 times.  After all, old white men are the master splainers and being treated as an empty vessel needing to be filled by some self-appointed Jerry Jump-up expert is just outrageous for the old politico.

The room last Wednesday was filled with people who have a great deal of experience, they knew about their neighborhood, the project and some were experts in their field.  One in particular needs to be heard by more of our community who have battled with the engineering and planning departments, Boone Hellman. Mr. Hellman is just one of many with expertise and in this case real technical expertise. All of the speakers are worth hearing if you haven't yet.

Another aspect of this is how demeaning it is.  Women are all too familiar with the problem of men explaining things, and as historian and author Rebecca Solnit writes:

" . . . billions of women must be out there on this 6-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever. This goes way beyond Men Explaining Things, but it's part of the same archipelago of arrogance. 

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another fortysomething years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath."

In our little Petrie dish that is the Encinitas City Council, a microcosm - like hundreds of thousand of other towns our size across the country, is where we are all trying to advocate for ourselves and our communities in matters of governance.  This is a chance to connect the dots and empathise with others who have been marginalized, ignored, silenced, patronized, lied to or abused.

Stocksplaining doesn't rest well with anyone except Jerome Stocks himself, yet it's a feature not a bug. It is obviously a gigantic myth he holds about himself.  It's time for him to be voted out of the city council, along with his friend Muir.

2009 Cartoon Parody in Real Time - REDUX

The Crest Drive Appeal brought 30 public speakers before the city council last Wednesday night, August 15 to defend the historic pines and vegetation along their street.  When reviewing the various city council member's discussion it was clear the parody from Leucadia blog in 2009 was being acted out in real time. The images from the 2009 Encinitas City Council Guide are included after each clip from last Wednesday.   What do you think?

"Jerome Stocks is Eddie Haskell. He has a tendency for being insincerely courteous. When the spotlight is turned off his true side comes out. He is the most willing council member to put his own fortunes ahead of the citizens, and he does that in the backroom as much as possible so he doesn't have to take responsibility."

 

"Jim Bond is Grandpa Simpson. Grandpa Simpson might have been a mover and shaker when young and still eager. He still belts out some classic lines of wisdom from time to time, but he is worn out. Expect him to provide a guiding hand on the lucky occasion, but he is over it. His heart is the right place but there is no leadership left in him."

 "Teresa Barth is Lois Lane from Superman I. Not just on the job, but eager to dig in and get to the bottom of the story and then do something about it. From an outside perspective some of her interactions might seem awkward or uncomfortable, but that is because she is so focused on the big story and has that in mind." 

It was fun to revist that lively period in Leucadia blog's history.   Ironically this parody was published on the same night that the great Leucadia tree cutting at Orpheus Park brought a crowd to city hall speaking out for the beloved trees in the neighborhood. Three more years with the council majority in control has meant very little has changed.  

Quote of the Day

Oh Lordy The Conventions Are Almost Here

I'm not anti-convention even if they are just theater, but when 15,000 journalists show up to cover an event which should be covered by pointing a camera at the podium and turning it on, feel free to roll your eyes at the cries of anguish about declining journalism budgets.
by Atrios

According to Mary: Tree

We Write Letters

By Olivier Canler - printed at North County Times

For most participants, the process of updating the housing and land-use elements of the Encinitas General Plan has been frustrating and difficult. These elements must be resolved before the City Council can consider the overall General Plan Update. To engage the public in re-drafting the housing element, the city administered a dot-mapping exercise that pitted the five Encinitas communities against each other. We have yet to see the results of that exercise.

Consequently, the General Plan Update is stalled after two years of work, and there's still no red-line version from the current general plan. These circumstances should produce local political drama in the run-up to the November election.
Some residents who were concerned with the potential outcome of the dot-mapping exercise have formed a committee called the Encinitas Project. The committee's goal is simple: a ballot initiative that would let registered voters in Encinitas decide on major density increases in the city.

At issue are up-zoning decisions meant to increase the density set by the present General Plan. A four of five member majority of the Encinitas City Council is required to approve certain up-zoning in the five communities ---- New Encinitas, Old Encinitas, Cardiff, Leucadia, Olivenhain ---- that make up the city.

Since the General Plan Update won't go before the current council before November's election, the next city council will eventually vote on it, should the present procedure remain in place. However, if the Encinitas Right-to-Vote Initiative reaches the ballot and voters approve it, residents will decide if major density increases should be allowed in the city.
With the Encinitas Right-to-Vote Initiative in place, voters would have the opportunity to decide if proposed changes respect community character, and maintain or improve their quality of life. Poorly planned projects that would increase traffic and the carbon footprint, degrade infrastructure, force density or height changes, or just fit badly with our community character would have little chance of approval.

The initiative is not no-growth, but it would mean growth most people can abide. The Encinitas Right-to-Vote Initiative would take the trickery out of land speculation. Developers would have to work within current zoning. Pushing city council members to up-zone would stop. Similarly, city planners would have to submit proposed up-zoning to a vote of the people. The initiative would subject the General Plan Update to a voters' referendum. The Encinitas Right-to-Vote Initiative would govern major housing and land-use amendments.

Most Encinitas residents want to maintain our small beach-town atmosphere. We're concerned about environmental issues, traffic, adequate resources, proper infrastructure and overall quality of life. We love our town and want to keep loving it. As Encinitas approaches built-out status, growth can only go two ways: denser and taller. A look at community history reveals that local control of growth motivated Encinitas to incorporate in 1986. Passing the Encinitas Right-to-Vote Initiative is in keeping with that precedent.

Volunteers are starting to walk neighborhoods to gather the number of signatures needed to get the initiative on a future ballot. Volunteers will also be in front of stores with forms for registered voters to sign. You can also find out more about the initiative by visiting www.EncinitasRightToVote.com.

A Council Advocating for Its Citizens - Imagine

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 15, 2012

2:15 PM

CONTACT: Friends of The Earth

Kendra Ulrich: (216) 571-7340, kulrich@foe.org

Diane Moss: (310) 463-1355

Santa Monica Council Urges Probe of San Onofre Reactors

Council unanimously votes for state investigation of San Onofre costs, reliability and alternative energy resources and urges federal license amendment hearing

SANTA MONICA, Calif. - August 15 - Last night, the Santa Monica City Council voted unanimously to urge the state to fully investigate the costs and reliability of the crippled San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and to compare it to other available energy sources. The council also voted unanimously to urge federal regulators to hold a transparent and public license amendment procedure for the plant’s twin reactors.

The reactors at San Onofre have been shut down since January, when one of the thousands of thin, tightly packed tubes in the newly replaced steam generators failed and leaked radioactive steam into the environment. Further testing revealed unprecedented, accelerated wear in thousands of these tubes, less than two years after the steam generators were replaced. 

In a decision filed on December 15, 2005, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a plan under which Southern California Edison could bill ratepayers up to $680 million for the costs of four replacement steam generators ($569 million for replacement steam generator installation and $111 million for removal and disposal of the original steam generators). The CPUC required a reasonableness review for expenses beyond this amount and set a maximum ratepayer collection cap of $782 million. A technical report commissioned by Friends of the Earth estimated the cost of repairing or replacing the faulty generators at San Onofre at $400 million to $800 million. This estimate does not include the costs of replacement power, inspections and preliminary repairs, which according to recent reports by Edison have already reached $165 million. 

Under state law, Edison can ask the California Public Utilities Commission to allow it to recover its costs through rate increases to its customers. An investigation by the CPUC, such as the one called for by the Santa Monica City Council, could end in a ruling that Edison, not its customers, is liable for the costs. Such a ruling could push Edison to  permanently shut down the reactors rather than incur additional expenses.

The Council vote also directs the City of Santa Monica to urge the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to conduct a public, transparent license amendment hearing on San Onofre. A license amendment is a formal, open and legally adjudicated procedure that would allow for independent expert review of the significant modifications to the replacement steam generators. Under NRC rules, a license amendment is required for major design changes to replacement equipment like those Edison made to these replacement components. In a petition before the NRC, Friends of the Earth and other public interest groups charge that the replacement generators were not “like for like” as Edison presented them to regulators, but instead were substantially altered.

Santa Monica's action is similar to the resolution unanimously adopted last week by the Laguna Beach City Council.

###

Friends of the Earth is the U.S. voice of the world's largest grassroots environmental network, with member groups in 77 countries. Since 1969, Friends of the Earth has fought to create a more healthy, just world.

Famous Cardiffian Remembered

Last week the late Chalmers Johnson would have been the 81 years old.  Thought this was a good time for more people than just the political wonks to be exposed to a remarkable scholar who lived in Cardiff-by-the-Sea. This is the confluence of local, national and international politics in our little beach town.  Though not cited in the Wikipedia biography below, one of the most encouraging things Chalmers did [editor opinion] is acknowledge that he had been dead wrong for years in his support of the US military policies.  Footnotes have been omitted here, see source for these and the bibliography. His Blowback trilogy described below are excellent non-fiction summer reads or part of an Encinitas home library.

Chalmers Ashby Johnson (August 6, 1931 – November 20, 2010) was an American author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Korean War, was a consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973, and chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1972. He was also president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute (now based at the University of San Francisco), an organization promoting public education about Japan and Asia. He wrote numerous books including, most recently, three examinations of the consequences of American Empire: Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. A former cold warrior, his fears for the US have changed: 

"A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship."

Johnson was born in 1931 in Phoenix, Arizona. He earned a B.A. degree in Economics in 1953 and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science in 1957 and 1961 respectively. Both of his advanced degrees were from the University of California, Berkeley. Johnson met his wife Sheila, a junior at Berkeley, in 1956, and they were married in Reno, Nevada in May 1957. 

During the Korean War, Johnson served as a naval officer in Japan. He was the communications officer on a ship (the LST 883) "tasked with ferrying Chinese prisoners of war from South Korea back to North Korean ports." He taught political science at the University of California from 1962 until he retired from teaching in 1992. He was best known early in his career for his scholarship on the subjects of China and Japan. 

Johnson set the agenda for ten or fifteen years in social science scholarship on China with his book on peasant nationalism. His book MITI and the Japanese Miracle, on the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry was the preëminent study of the country's development and created the subfield of what could be called the political economy of development. He coined the term "developmental state". As a public intellectual, he first led the "Japan revisionists" who critiqued American neoliberal economics with Japan as a model; their arguments faded from view as the Japanese economy stagnated in the mid-90s and beyond. During this period, Johnson acted as a consultant for the Office of National Estimates, part of the CIA, contributing to analysis of China and Maoism. 

Johnson was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. He served as Director of the Center for Chinese Studies (1967–72[2]) and Chair of the Political Science Department at Berkeley, and held a number of important academic posts in area studies. He was a strong believer in the importance of language and historical training for doing serious research. Late in his career he became well known as a critic of "rational choice" approaches, particularly in the study of Japanese politics and political economy. 

Johnson is perhaps today best known as a sharp critic of American imperialism. His book Blowback (2000) won a prize in 2001 from the Before Columbus Foundation, and was re-issued in an updated version in 2004. Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, updated the evidence and argument from Blowback for the post-9/11 environment, and Nemesis concludes the trilogy. Johnson was featured as an expert talking head in the Eugene Jarecki-directed film Why We Fight, which won the 2005 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. In the past, Johnson has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, and The Nation. 

The Blowback series
Johnson believed that the enforcement of American hegemony over the world constitutes a new form of global empire. Whereas traditional empires maintained control over subject peoples via colonies, since World War II the US has developed a vast system of hundreds of military bases around the world where it has strategic interests. A long-time Cold Warrior, he applauded the dissolution of the Soviet Union: "I was a cold warrior. There's no doubt about that. I believed the Soviet Union was a genuine menace. I still think so." But at the same time he experienced a political awakening after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, noting that instead of demobilizing its armed forces, the US accelerated its reliance on military solutions to problems both economic and political. The result of this militarism (as distinct from actual domestic defense) is more terrorism against the US and its allies, the loss of core democratic values at home, and an eventual disaster for the American economy. Of four books he wrote on this topic, the first three are referred to as The Blowback Trilogy: 

Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
Chalmers Johnson summarized the intent of Blowback in the final chapter of Nemesis. 

"In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia -- the area of my academic training -- than on the Middle East." 

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
Chalmers Johnson summarizes the intent of The Sorrows of Empire in the final chapter of Nemesis 

"The Sorrows of Empire was written during the American preparations for and launching of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I began to study our continuous military buildup since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in other people's countries. This empire of bases is the concrete manifestation of our global hegemony, and many of the blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization." 

• Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

Chalmers Johnson summarizes the intent of the book Nemesis. 

“In Nemesis, I have tried to present historical, political, economic, and philosophical evidence of where our current behavior is likely to lead. Specifically, I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent. The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

• Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope

Johnson outlines how the United States can reverse American hegemony.

Update: Last week Tom's Dispatch posted one of the 100 best posts: Chalmer's 2004 article, Abolish the CIA!

Myths Encinitas

Tree City USA, Urban Forest Policy and other designations claimed by the Encinitas City is largely mythical. It just doesn't seem like Engineering got the memo from Public Works (and clearly unfamiliar with the Environmental Commission).  Public Works was in charge of writing the manual on Encinitas Urban Forest, including heritage trees.  Engineering is pretty much robotically wired to road code dimensions and are rarely swayed by real life or logic.

This particular week we have the perfect storm of empty rhetoric regarding city council policies actually effectively connecting and engaging various departments' supposed commitment to Encinitas community character, Encinitas trees and Encinitas Urban Forest.

Why? The agenda for Wednesday's meeting agenda includes the merging of two department director positions into one. Consolidation of the positions of Director of Engineering and Director of Public Works into Director of Engineering and Public Works. We question the success of that merger in the current culture at city hall that does not celebrate connectivity, collaboration or cooperation.

Meanwhile, another agenda item:
Public Hearing of the appeal of Engineering conditions for public improvements adjacent to 1794 Crest Drive. Reading through the appeal makes the many layers of trees, street standards, infrastructure, community character and financial hardship a complex web of assumptions, justification and a fair dose of misinterpretation.  Behind it all is money (see Growth: Ponzi Scheme series) and an authoritarian adherence to codes as power.  It's how it sounds to this reader. The appellant's challenges the reality of the city plan for a trail throughout the Crest Drive built out area will ever happen, yet alone that harms no trees. Another mythical notion of shared goals amongst departments with a council majority uninterested in making these connections.

It is very difficult to ascribe "good faith" to our city departments dealings with single family residents, given a long history of inconsistent treatment of resident requests. Indeed, there is a very real reluctance of homeowners, architects and contractors to come forward with individual stories because of fear of retaliation in their properties and businesses.

It's vital we all keep hearing, learning and sharing our preferred city government ideals.  Planting trees should be more than a political photo op. There are  fantastic examples all around us, and some close by, of a better way to deal with sincere connections to our public spaces, our trees and our private property and business owners.  These magnificent pines on Crest Drive and all the other vegetation is of upmost importance in this time of drought, climate change, erosion, need for sustainability and economic depression.

Andy Lipkis, well known TreePeople founder, known to many in Encinitas speaks here about  our need for functioning community forests as acupuncture used strategically to heal; for our watersheds, to create oxygen and filters for our air and coolants and . . . well start at 6:00 to dive right into it. Enabling community is at the heart and soul of this for success.  We could have this kind of thinking on our city council.

Love the part about we Americans just hate to be told what to do, but when informed we want to help.

Crest Drive is yet another opportunity for our city council to seek policy for connections and restoration rather than piecemeal acquisition of scattered contract work for favored vendors. After Wednesday there will only be about a half dozen council meetings until the election. Time to envision change and campaign for it too. 

Quote of the Day

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” – Kung Fu Monkey

Speaking of Orcs . . . Strategy of campaign as battle zone will soon commence as Jerome Stocks has officially entered the 2012 city council election.

The one thing that unites Encinitas voters across all kinds of party lines and differences is simply this one thing we all can agree on together, it's time to end Stocks council career. There are so many opportunities in our communities going unexplored and unsupported.

Crest Drive

On Aug. 15, the Encinitas City Council will hear arguments against City Engineering Department mandates for curb, gutter and pedestrian walkway on Crest Drive, a rural residential subdivision of one-acre lots within old Encinitas.In the proposed single family home, the city originally asked for 8 feet of concrete pavers with curbs 450 feet long and a 5 foot walkway, eliminating 13 feet of natural landscaping and threatening old growth trees and vegetation along Crest Drive. 

All the land adjacent to the pavement would also need to be removed and graded down to the level of the street, thereby widening the street by over 26 feet when both sides are complete. 

The City Engineering Department stated, “ Our goal is to have curb, gutter and sidewalk on every home in Encinitas.”

Excerpt from Coast News article by Kevin Farrell, we recommend reading the whole piece. It ends with this call to action.

"We don’t understand the benefit the city would get from this. With so many people opposed throughout Encinitas, it would be a win, win, for the City to re-evaluate and leave our neighborhoods the way we want, not some Engineers personal preference. We have appealed the engineers finding to our City Council members for a final determination. We are optimistic the Council will assist in helping preserve our trees and vegetation thus maintaining the Community Character we love. 

Please join me at the City Council meeting next Wednesday at 6 p.m. and help support this worthy cause in keeping Encinitas, the way it was. A presence in numbers will help to get our point across." 

This council agenda item triggered the memory of Joni Mitchell's song we posted on Thursday, singing "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."  The lyrics are perfectly apt for Mayor Stocks bragging at his state of the city address last April 18th.  The following clip was first posted after the last council meeting before this break with this introduction.

"Jerome Stocks' perspective on parking lots, traffic, commerce, pot holes, walkable streets, safe routes, etc. at last April's state of the city speech. This speech was directed at a car-centric approach to city planning. Wrong decade, false assumptions and giant omissions."

It's probably no coincidence that Stocks is called out for including tree-lined Crest Drive in his bragging, while city engineers are ginning up rationale to fell these same trees.  The man either has no ethics or no clue what the words coming from his mouth mean.

Photo at Opening from April 21, 2012 article, North County Times, about Crest Drive Petition. 

Related Posts:

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer
• Redefining Normal
• Tuesday is Dues-day: Tail Wags Dog Planning

According to Mary: A Not Uncommon Scnerio

Encinitas famous resident cartoonist, artist, gardener and informed citizen, Mary Fleener.

Can't believe we are still protesting this . . .

Joni Mitchell wrote "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot" 42 years ago. It could have been written today for our council majority and their backers. Two generations of protest on behalf of the quality of life. Is anyone listening? (They aren't.)

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Hey farmer farmer
Put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

FIRE

Finance + Insurance + Real Estate = FIRE

"Thirty years ago we could still write of a dichotomy– industry versus finance—and categorize GE and GM as industrial firms, with Goldman Sachs as a financial firm. Those days are gone, with GM requiring a bail-out because of its financial misdealings (auto production was just a sideline business used to burden households with debt owed to GMAC, the main business line), and Goldman Sachs buying up all the grain silos to run up food prices in a speculative bubble. Obamacare simply fortifies the Vampire Squid’s control of the healthcare industry as it inserts its strangling tentacles into every facet of life. 

Food? Financialized. Energy? Financialized. Healthcare? Financialized. Homes? Financialized. Government? Financialized. Death? Financialized. There no longer is a separation of the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) and the nonFIRE sectors of the economy. It is all FIRE."

This excerpt is from a post authored By Professor L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Research Director with the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability and Senior Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute. It originally appeared at Economonitor's Great Leap Forward Blog.

What seems near criminal in Encinitas is that seeming lack of cognition from the council majority and the city staff of how seriously complicit and corrupt the FIRE forces are in the global financial crisis the envelopes our little Encinitas community.  The public keeps trying to confront the city's vulnerabilities in unfunded liabilities with pensions, municipal bonds, the recent revenue lease bond scheme and more and they get bupkus in response.

It is as though Jim Bond rambling and scoffing in his revisionist reveling at each meeting, or Jerome Stocks being sneeringly superior when any financial scheme is questioned, or Mark Muir mouthing naive observations for the camera or Kristin Gaspar rifling through her pink-highlighted spreadsheet notes are supposed to give any well-read adult in Encinitas confidence.

Of course the majority strategy always was and will be a deep commitment to public apathy and indifference.  They are loyal party vassals who have followed their own leaders ahead in the clown car. They also can count on the 24% clueless vote who just need to hear some dog whistle words to vote against their own best interests.  The council majority serves the tiny group where their funding comes from (and it's primarily out of town and large scale, corporate) and these donors are concentrated as players with FIRE where the money lives. The council encumbants' role is to make a display of caring about public intent and no more. For the mayor even a showing of that it is stretch.

Professor Wray begins his post with this bit of background.

As the Global Financial Crisis rumbles along in its fifth year, we read the latest revelations of bankster fraud, the LIBOR scandal. This follows the muni bond fixing scam detailed a couple of weeks ago, as well as the J.P. Morgan trading fiasco and the Corzine-MF Global collapse and any number of other scandals in recent months. In every case it was traders run amuck, fixing “markets” to make an easy buck at someone’s expense. In times like these, I always recall Robert Sherrill’s 1990 statement about the S&L crisis that - “thievery is what unregulated capitalism is all about.” 

After 1990 we removed what was left of financial regulations following the flurry of deregulation of the early 1980s that had freed the thrifts so that they could self-destruct. And we are shocked, SHOCKED!, that thieves took over the financial system. 

Nay, they took over the whole economy and the political system lock, stock, and barrel. They didn’t just blow up finance, they oversaw the swiftest transfer of wealth to the very top the world has ever seen. They screwed workers out of their jobs, they screwed homeowners out of their houses, they screwed retirees out of their pensions, and they screwed municipalities out of their revenues and assets.

A very despairing perspective, it's agreed.  Here is the challenge.  Are there enough people in Encinitas willing to hear the new voices like Lisa Shaffer and Tony Kranz? We are lucky enough to have these two dedicated citizens running against these entrenched FIRE breathers?  The FIRE folks will throw a lot of money at the boys to buy this election like they bought a seat at the last election.  Only engaged people, people fired up will best that kind of an undemocratic approach.  Fighting FIRE with our own kind of fire.