Month: May 2017

The Ocean Beach Town Council will hold a forum on short term vacation rentals tonight at its monthly meeting, – Wednesday, May 24th.

Hopefully, there will be discussions about how the hundreds of short term rentals in OB and other coastal communities are cutting into the community’s housing stock – and making rents higher and even more restrictive.

When there are hundreds of STVRs, neighborhoods are negatively impacted and disrupted, and even the character of a neighborhood can be altered.

And deep critics of short term vacation rentals understand this larger consequence, and that is it indeed, the Loss of Community that is the most dangerous aspect of this ‘home-sharing’ trend – especially at the beach.

The old adage that the cover-up is worse than the crime may once again prove true.

By Marjorie Cohn

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has responded to the crescendo of outrage by appointing former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump’’ and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation’’ as well as any other matters within the scope of the Department of Justice (DOJ) regulation on special counsel appointments.

The San Diego chapter of the Surfrider Foundation is part of the world-wide movement to ban plastic straws in restaurants, the so-called “Straw Wars” campaign, part of a wider effort to get restaurants certified as Ocean-Friendly Restaurants (OFR).

A number of OB restaurants are currently ocean-friendly, according to Surfrider.

But now we hear that 3 “high-profile” restaurants in other parts of San Diego have joined this movement to limit the number of plastic straws, many of which end up polluting our oceans and harming marine life. An estimated 500 million plastic straws are used by Americans everyday, and many of them splash down in our coastal waterways and oceans.

By Rick Jahnkow / Draft NOtices

The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) recently released a report on U.S. military personnel policy that, among other things, recommends registering women for the draft and giving all young people the military’s aptitude test when they register.

The report’s title is “Building a F.A.S.T. Force: A Flexible Personnel System for a Modern Military” (F.A.S.T stands for Fully engaged, Adaptable, Sustainable, and Technically proficient). It was created by a BPC task force that includes former Department of Defense officials, retired military officers, and several former U.S. senators.

There’s the soft opening of Ocean Beach’s new recycling center going on!

It is conveniently located cliffside, with breathtaking views.

By Geoff Page

Here is a report of the Peninsula Community Planning Board’s regular monthly meeting on Thursday, May 18, 2017.

Board Opposed to Sponsoring Town Hall Meeting on Forming Point Loma Town Council

The agenda item that seemed to have generated the most interest was a presentation on creating a town council for Point Loma. Peninsula resident Michael Winn is spearheading this effort. It appeared that this was Winn’s idea that came about because Winn and others had seen that the community planning board was unable to deal effectively with some community issues due to various restrictions the board is bound by.

This Wednesday, May 24th, the Ocean Beach Town Council will be providing a forum on the topic of short-term vacation rentals. The title of the forum is “Shorting OB Community via Short Term Vacation Rentals”.

The meeting will be held at 7:00 pm, inside the Masonic Center at 1711 Sunset Cliffs Blvd., in Ocean Beach.

from OBTC:

Last week, members of the OB Town Council advocated for a new OB Lifeguard Station before the San Diego City Council. Below is a copy of the testimony given by OBTC President Gretchen Newsom with support from OBTC boardmembers Gio Ingolia and Andrew Waltz:

I stand here to inform you that the Ocean Beach Town Council is in support of Councilmember Lorie Zapf’s efforts to obtain design funding for a new Ocean Beach Lifeguard Station as identified in her 2018 Budget Priorities memorandum. This project is consistent with the Ocean Beach Community Plan and is a long time advocated need within the community and by community based organizations.

Typically, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office conducts more investigations into CLETS misuse than any other agency. This time, they did not file anything at all.

By Dave Maass / Electronic Frontier Foundation

Police in California have your data literally at their fingertips.

They can sit at a computer terminal or in their squad car and check your DMV records, your criminal records, your parking citations, any restraining orders you’ve filed or have been filed against you. They can search other state databases and even tap into the FBI’s trove. If you’ve got a snowmobile, they can look up that registration too. Much of this personal data they can access through a smartphone app.

by Geoff Page

A couple of hot topics were discussed at the Midway/ Pacific Highway Community Planning Group’s regular monthly meeting on Wednesday, May 17 at the San Diego Community College’s West City Campus on Fordham Street.

Sunbreak Ranch

The first was something with an endearing sounding name, Sunbreak Ranch, as a possible interim solution for a not so endearing problem, the homeless. The second was an idea for having the City of San Diego become an energy provider.

By South OB Girl

As the OB Rag reported on Friday, May 19th, it’s been a long, slow saga for Apple Tree Market to reopen after the owner, Saad Hirmez, was forced out of the site where he had his first market (where the CVS is now at Cable and Santa Monica).

Monday May 22nd is the soft opening for the brand new Apple Tree.

It was a palace civil war and nobody in the break-away group even bothered to ask their members what to do.

By Jim Miller

Last week I outlined why the ill-conceived Mickey Kasparian-driven split in San Diego labor was such a bad idea, citing the recent history of the failed attempt of several national unions to form a break-away organization outside of the AFL-CIO called Change to Win (CTW) that eventually fell apart under its own weight accomplishing not much of note in the long run.