At last month’s May 9 meeting, first-year Councilmember Cori Schumacher called for a discussion of how to formalize the process for appointments to city committees and commissions to improve public transparency. Mayor Matt Hall was stumped.
“We’ve done this same process for almost 40 years,” he patiently explained to the rookie council member, “and it seems like it’s worked out all right up to this point. Help me understand what we need to fix.” [Read more…]
Should the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) talk directly to you about airport expansion projects when it funds up to 90 percent of their cost?
In 2016, the FAA revised its 1976 Airport Planning Communication Policy in the October edition of its Advisory Circular titled “Community Involvement in Airport Planning.” As it turns out, for individual projects, the FAA wants you to talk to the county, not them at all. [Read more…]
Several times every year, the Board of Supervisors approves county Airport Division, requests (1) to expand airport capacity and (2) to seek 90% FAA grants to pay for the expansion. Usually, county avoids any meaningful environmental analysis. For instance, at McClellan-Palomar Airport in North County, county is preparing its first EIR in 40 years for its pending 2017-2037 Palomar Airport Master Plan.
In theory, council members and supervisors vote for projects that best serves the community. In reality, it is the business community which fills campaign coffers thereby sacrificing community betterment to political expediency. [Read more…]
Fifty-one stationary cameras, in 14 locations, together with six mobile devices added to the ones already installed on two police cars, will soon capture the license plate numbers of all cars passing through the Carlsbad. They’ll be submitted to a national database that tracks stolen vehicles and those involved in crimes.
At its March 14 meeting, on a 4 to 1 vote, the Carlsbad city Council approved the $802,000 plan to conduct surveillance of residents and non-residents alike.
The justification for placing everyone under suspicion until they’re cleared in cyberspace was driven by a misleading police report on the city’s crime rate. Only newly-elected Councilmember Cori Schumacher challenged the numbers and the threat to privacy rights. [Read more…]
According to a 2011/2012 San Diego Grand Jury Report, Tri-City Healthcare District Continuing Issues, May 30, 2012, “The Grand Jury believes the coming election to be an excellent opportunity for the electorate to remake the current Tri-City Hospital Board of Directors into a less distracting and more professional body.”
So, how did that go? In the four years since the 2012 election, the “remade” board fired its CEO, hired and fired his replacement, and hired another to take his place.
A series of failed lawsuits cost the hospital over $30 million in settlements, attorneys fees, and lost revenue resulting from bogus allegations related to the purchase of a medical office building that remains vacant to this day on the hospital’s campus. [Read more…]
At the California Coastal Commission’s May 11 meeting Carlsbad Mayor Matt Hall testified that the city’s General Plan, updated last September, reflects the community’s vision for its future. But the responses to Carlsbad’s 2009 Public Opinion Visioning Survey Report paint a different picture.
Hall claimed the plan “provides a policy framework that will ensure we live up to our community vision and ensure an excellent quality of life for all who live, work, and visit our coastal city. In fact, values like small town beach community character, access to recreation and open space and multi-modal transportation are top of mind for our residents and given high priority in our General Plan.”
But when you find the General Plan’s land use changes allow mixed use commercial/residential development and high-density shopping malls to be built near the Agua Hedionda Lagoon and on property where the Encina Power Plant now stands, you begin to see the disconnect with the community’s actual vision. [Read more…]
By Richard Riehl / The Riehl World
Regional shopping centers and mixed use residential developments were not allowed to sneak past the California Coastal Commission, thanks to the vigilance of Olga Diaz, the organization’s commissioner, and the leadership of Cori Schumacher, a candidate forCarlsbad City Council.
The attempted scheme was halted during the Coastal Commission’s May 11 meeting to approve a Local Coastal Plan (LCP) Amendment to the city’s General Plan Update. [Read more…]
By John Garcia / SD350.org
During the past year, the San Diego North County Coastal cities have taken steps forward in implementing their Climate Action Plans (CAP) and studying Community Choice Energy (CCE) initiatives, which will enhance their ability to significantly increase their use of Clean Energy in the future.
Three of the cities – Encinitas, Carlsbad, and Del Mar – have formally approved their Climate Action Plans. The Encinitas Climate Action Plan was approved in March 2011. It was not tied to a General Plan and therefore had purely voluntary measures. This month however, the Encinitas City Council voted to draft a new, enforceable Climate Action Plan as mitigation for the housing element of their General Plan and to allocate $100,000 towards its development.
[Read more…]
Five candidates have declared their intention to challenge the two at-large incumbents in Carlsbad’s city council election in November. If they want to bring real change, beyond the addition of new faces, to the city’s go-along-to-get-along political cronyism, they should also lobby for a new city ordinance to limit the amount and source of campaign donations from individuals, business interests, and special interest groups, beginning with the 2018 election.
That’s when the three other council members, who did the most damage to the council’s credibility in the last two years, will be up for reelection. There’s plenty of evidence big money, much of it from out of town, guides the decisions of these city leaders.
[Read more…]
While outsiders Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump attack insider politics at the national level, a rapidly growing number of local citizen activists, who Carlsbad Mayor Matt Hall once claimed were controlled by outside agitators, have launched a political revolution of their own. It began on August 25, 2015, when the City Council ignored the objections of an overflow crowd of residents calling for a special election to decide whether a billionaire L.A. developer would be entrusted with the future of the city’s pristine Agua Hedionda Lagoon for the next 30 years.
The Council had three choices that evening. They could put off their decision for thirty days to seek citizen input, they could call a special election, or they could approve the project. They voted unanimously to approve it. Outraged opponents gathered enough signatures to overrule the council’s decision and put the matter up for a vote. Measure A, supporting the council’s decision to allow the developer to build a shopping mall at the lagoon, was easily defeated, thanks to an army of volunteer political activists. [Read more…]
Over the last two years Carlsbad residents have watched city leaders squander more than $1 million to outsource the future of their Village by the Sea.
They fell in love with L.A. billionaire developer Rick Caruso’s promises to transform the site of the Agua Hedionda Lagoon into a shopping mall magnet for $2.6 million in annual tax revenue, preserve strawberry fields already saved by Prop D, and build scenic trails, all at no cost to the city. After a citizens-led referendum overturned the City Council’s unanimous support of the project, the Council ponied up $650,000 for a special election that allowed voters to send Caruso packing.
In March 2014, while Caruso courted council members, the city signed a $380,000 contract with Dover, Kohl and Partners, a Florida consulting firm, to create the Carlsbad Village and Barrio Master Plan to update the Carlsbad Village Master Plan and Design Manual, the one that was written by city planners and approved in June 2013. The 2016 plan is currently under review by the city’s Planning Commission. [Read more…]
At the Carlsbad City Council’s April 12 meeting, Dale Bartlett, policy manager for the Humane Society of the United States puppy mill campaign, will ask the council to ban stores that source their pets from puppy mills. Oceanside, Encinitas and San Marcos have already instituted such bans.
So far, only council members Keith Blackburn and Lorraine Wood have agreed to meet with local animal rights activists about a ban. Mayor Hall and council members Mark Packard and Michael Schumacher have refused to meet with them. [Read more…]
