We were told last year that our water rates in the City of San Diego would go up on January 1st of 2016. That prompted me to look a little more closely at the most recent bill which includes December and January. This year’s bill for the winter months, when outside watering was unnecessary, broke a hundred dollars.
Yes, the rates have gone up. But in addition to the amount due other information on the bill caught my eye. [Read more…]
A billionaire L.A. developer came to town planning to transform one of Carlsbad’s three lagoons into a magnet for tourist dollars. After winning the approval of local officials, he encountered a group of protesters bent on preserving the lagoon the right way.
No, that’s not the story of Rick Caruso’s plan to build a shopping mall next to the Agua Hedionda Lagoon. It’s about another L.A. developer’s failed attempt to build an amusement park, Nemo’s Secret Harbor, surrounding the Batiquitos lagoon in 1972. The L.A. Times carried a retrospective story about the fiasco on March 31, 1985.
The size and scope of the 1972 project dwarfs Caruso’s. But the developer’s aim was the same, to make money off the site’s beauty while putting it at risk. There are, however, two important differences: [Read more…]
Today, Wednesday February 10, the City Council Smart Growth and Land Use (SG&LU) Committee will be asked to recommend approval to the full City Council of the marketing for sale of six City-owned properties that the Real Estate Asset Department (READ) has declared surplus and excess to the needs of the City.
Prior SDFP articles on the topic called into question the efficacy, advisability and propriety of how these properties have been declared surplus and why. We published the list of properties that was brought forward last summer as an “informational” item by READ.
Here is an update and status report with some editorializing. [Read more…]
Our controversial nuclear legacy and questions about health, truth and future risks By Nicole Hoepner Sleeping dragons. Stirring the thin blankets of secret cold-war facilities, nuclear power plants and feebly stored radioactive waste. We quietly sneak around their massive shadows. We tell our children fairy tales of mankind’s control over technology, over nature. The story […]
A virtual tsunami of opposition has met the move on the California Coastal Commission to oust the head of its staff, Charles Lester. The move – called “a coup” by environmentalists – is an attempt by the pro-development clique of commissioners to remove Lester who is the Executive Director.
And the move is in the middle of a key decision by the Commission on the fate of a huge development project near Newport Beach of million dollar mansions.
Lester’s fate is supposed to be decided at their monthly meeting, to be held this month in Morro Bay on February 10th through 12th. Here’s our initial post on the controversy. [Read more…]
In a recent interview, Naomi Klein discussed the reality facing anyone interested in promoting meaningful climate action. The “structural problem” we face, according to Klein, is that people can “simultaneously understand the medium to long term risks of climate change” and still believe it is in their “short term economic [or political] interest” to continue business as usual. This is precisely the situation concerned San Diegans face when dealing with the San Diego Association of Governments’ (SANDAG) limited vision when it comes to taking the actions needed to address the pressing threat of climate change at the local level.
As Doug Porter has pointed out here in the San Diego Free Press, given SANDAG’s history, it’s easy to be cynical about our regional planning efforts. Nonetheless, our future hopes depend on us not giving up. We must continue to push for a just, sustainable future.
Last Friday, the San Diego Quality of Life Coalition, a group of labor, environmental, social justice, affordable housing, and transit organizations representing over 150,000 San Diego County residents submitted a vision statement to SANDAG’s Transportation and Regional Planning Committee meetings for consideration as the basis for the sales tax ballot measure currently under discussion at SANDAG. [Read more…]
By Bill Adams / San Diego UrbDeZine
People know that air pollution is bad for their health, that auto exhaust emissions contribute to air pollution, and that certain cities suffer worse air pollution than others. Some people pay attention to smog reports and even avoid strenuous activities on smoggy days. What most people don’t know is that there is a certain type of auto emission pollutant that discriminates in a most predictable but unfair way. It’s also a pretty safe assumption that people aren’t fully aware of the severity of the health impacts from this pollutant.
Every year, hundreds of decisions are made in which the life and health of thousands of people are unknowingly sacrificed to this pollutant for the convenience or profit of others who are relatively safe from it. Second hand cigarette smoke, GMOs, and high tension power lines, have all captured the public attention and sparked outcries for change. When the public becomes aware of this auto exhaust pollutant and the pathology and inequality of its health impact, it is reasonable to believe they will demand a dramatic change in our transportation priorities.
To understand this pollutant and how it works, one most first understand that there are different types of air pollution – even from a single source like an automobile. Most people think of smog. Few people are aware of the more dangerous and discriminatory particulate pollution, also known as ultra-fine particulate pollution (UFP). Exposure to this type of pollution is entirely dependent on proximity to source. In other words, exposure depends on how close you live or work near a busy roadway, whether a road is expanded near you, whether your child is in a school near a busy roadway, or how much time you spend driving. [Read more…]
For many months now the Big Story about water in California has been about the drought–as in we don’t have enough. On Tuesday, the State Water Resources Control Board voted to extend water restrictions thru October 2016.
Here in San Diego, according to Voice of San Diego, we’ve got so much water that the County Water Authority has dumped a half billion gallons of recently desalinated and other treated drinking water into the Lower Otay Reservoir near Chula Vista.
In case you haven’t looked at you water bill yet, you’re being charged more for doing such a good job of conserving water last year. [Read more…]
By Monique López/ Environmental Health Coalition
We all need to move. How we get from place to place is deeply connected to our quality of life. Unfortunately, not all communities have the same access to healthy, safe, reliable and affordable transportation options, such as public transit and biking and walking paths.
That means some people don’t have access to the same quality of life, just because of where they live. Transportation justice is the equal access of all people to the transportation they need for a better quality of life.
Now, SANDAG has proposed a half-cent sales tax increase slated for the November 2016 ballot to generate new money for transportation projects in San Diego County [Read more…]
No question about it—being involved in a coalition to build a tiny village of tiny shelters for people who are without a place to live, is damn exciting! I can’t put my finger on exactly why this is taking over my brain activity—from waking up in the morning ready to get online and share ideas, to dreaming about it at night. Maybe it’s what someone at our community meeting last week said about it—tiny homes are sexy! [Read more…]
By Besame / Daily Kos
Forty years ago Mexico’s monarch butterfly winter mirabilia were known only to those who lived among them. Campesinos who celebrate their arrival in late autumn, wondered where the billions of magical beings went every spring when the dense clusters separated into individual butterflies, flew off high mountain trees, and disappeared. Forty years ago, people in the U.S. and Canada wondered what happened to the orange and black skydancers when they lifted into the air and left every autumn.
Forty-one years ago both mysteries connected and in August 1976 the zoologist behind this effort published an answer, but withheld specific location details. As we know now, summer’s last monarchs fly south, leaving their northern homes, funneling into a stream to fly across the border and down the Sierra Madre mountains to over-wintering sites in Mexico. [Read more…]
By Jill Richardson / Common Dreams
Mark Winne, an author and anti-hunger activist, often says that the most important word in “community garden” isn’t “garden.” I saw this firsthand not long ago.
Standing in the sun between several small garden plots all morning, it may not have looked like much was going on. A few people stood in a circle, chatting. Occasionally, one would leave, or another would arrive. Several others were nearby, working in their garden plots.
Some of the people were black. Some were white. And two — a mother and child — appeared Southeast Asian.
The garden plots were equally varied. One was filled entirely with sugarcane. Another grew luffa gourds. Still another grew banana trees. That’s one of the perks of gardening in San Diego — you can grow your own bananas if you wish. [Read more…]
