Month: August 2015

There is a new twist and turn in the road for the Ocean Beach Community Plan Update’s journey to the California Coastal Commission for approval.

And probably only the most stalwart, knowledgeable and insightful of OB’s local volunteer neighborhood planners are able to see over this twist and turn and figure out exactly what is going on.

The new twist is caused by the recent release of the California Coastal Commission staff’s recommendations toward the OB Community Plan Update – scheduled for review by the Commission on August 13th when they hold their monthly meeting – this time in Chula Vista City Council chambers.

Trying to awaken San Diegans and other Californians to the dangers of fracking – the controversial oil-extraction process, a dozen protesters gathered in Saratoga Park on Saturday, August 1st. They joined protests in more than a dozen cities around California – all aimed at protesting the governor’s support for the hydraulic process.

Sponsored by the California based Courage Campaign, Californians Against Fracking and Rootskeeper, organizers also gathered signatures on a petition to be sent to Gov. Brown.

The OB Planning Board meets this Wednesday, August 5th, at 6pm within the community meeting room at the OB Rec Center, 4726 Santa Monica Avenue.

Several important items top the all-volunteer Board’s agenda, including an update on the OB Community Plan, a possible naming of Saratoga Park, the construction of the new OB Plaza development, and the building of a unit in the 4700 block of Niagara Avenue.

The “Ocean Beach Plaza”

Possibly one of the most important commercial developments to come before the OB Board in recent years, the “Ocean Beach Plaza” is up for review.

by John Lawrence

As July drew to a close 8000 firefighters were battling 18 large fires in the state of California. A lot of people are being forced to evacuate their homes. In fact evacuations are becoming a way of life. Triple digit temperatures, bone dry vegetation and gusty winds are spreading fires everywhere.

A fast-spreading wildfire north of San Francisco has torched homes and is threatening more than 450 structures. At least 650 residents have been evacuated from their homes as the blaze raged in hills covered in dense brush and oak trees and dotted with ranch homes. 23 square miles near Lower Lake, south of Clear Lake, have been charred.

A separate fire near the small town of Isleton in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta burned six or seven mobile homes. Residents of 200 homes in the central California community of Cascadel Woods were ordered to evacuate last Thursday.

The maps of our memories fray like fine gauze

By Jim Miller

We are where we are from. Place, our place or “home,” gives us a sense of rootedness and identity, but it is also transient, always moving and changing as we ride the river of time and space.

Some places are fundamentally grounded in a central idea of what “home” is, of what defines a locality—the people in such places hold fast, perhaps futilely, to some notion of what it means to be there.

Not us though, not here in San Diego where history and tradition outside of empty tourist spectacles are cast off like a snakeskin and our sense of place is transformed by the whims of boosters and marketing schemes, sometimes erasing whole communities in the service of civic marketing.