Month: July 2017

By Ernie McCray

Hey, y’all, have you heard?
Everybody’s talking ‘bout the “I” word.
“Impeachment,” in other words:
throwing The Donald to the curb;
finally fed up
with him on our last nerve
like a cowboy riding a wild bronco
wrangled from the herd;
realizing it is
extraordinarily absurd
continuing to let this “I” word
be deferred and deterred and misheard and/or
unheard and slurred and unstirred,
considering that we have a leader
who is emotionally disturbed,
who, on his own,
has made himself the last word
when it comes to
lacking political decorum…

By Philip J. Bona for American Institute of Architects San Diego / San Diego UrbDeZine

The San Diego Region will struggle in every neighborhood to accommodate the population growth forecasted by SANDAG – as many as a million new residents by 2050.

San Diego already has a widely-recognized housing shortage that results in major annual price increases and undermines the city’s climate action plan as commuters go farther afield in search of affordability. The problem will only get worse unless we take bold steps to sensibly accommodate this inevitable growth.

An important tool in addressing this growth and implementing the climate action plan is a denser type of development that mixes residential and other uses along transit corridors and at transit stops. The city has already produced a great tool for implementing this type of transit oriented design, or TOD – the Morena Corridor Specific Plan.

Donald Trump, Jr., the president’s son, by releasing the train of texts about setting up a meeting with a Russian, Kremlin-linked lawyer because the attorney had “dirt on Clinton” – has just confessed to treason.

The meeting occurred on June 9, 2016; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and top advisor (and still in the White House with a security clearance) and Paul Manaforte, the then-campaign manager, with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Donald Jr. has now admitted with this release of the emails that he conspired with a Russian-government operative to interfere in the American presidential election.

COME INSIDE to Read the Emails on Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia Meeting

Funds for the new design of the Ocean Beach Lifeguard Station have been approved by the City Council and Mayor of San Diego. The approved $200,000 is now in this year’s budget and now the study and design phase for a new facility can begin.

A new lifeguard station has been at the top of the ‘needed infrastructure’ lists of both the OB Planning Board and the OB Town Council, plus we at the OB Rag have been advocating for a new one for years. The OBTC sent a letter to the Council during budget deliberations advocating for a new station, as did the Planning Board.

District 2 Councilmember Lorie Zapf did take up the cause and touted the funding approval as a great victory for her office. She had sponsored a Petition in support of the funding (which received a lukewarm response, however).

So, today – Wednesday, July 12th – is Net Neutrality Day. Now what? The short little video clip below is a reminder of what is at stake. If you haven’t yet sent your message to the FCC and your legislators, click here.

We at the OB Rag love watching all kinds of video. Those short visual stories entertain, inform, and agitate in a way completely different from the written word.

Since our platform is about expressing ideas and ideals instead of cash flow, clicks, or the commercialization of media, we have the freedom to include a wide range of topics and formats that might not work elsewhere. We don’t need or want text links articles, paid for content, promotional materials, or story lines designed to please donors.

Hey, you boomers! Where were you during the “Summer of Love” in Ocean Beach in 1967?

The OB Rag wants to know.

We’re complying a bunch of memories from those who remember the old days of 1967 when the counter-culture blew up and all of a sudden, young people were becoming hippies across the nation. And we’ll print up those responses that will explain it all. Or at least those that describe what happened.

About 3 weeks ago, we asked a similar question of our readers – and we received a bag of responses. Here’s part of what we said then:

Were you in or near OB during the “Summer of Love” in 1967?

By Mark Hughes / San Diego Free Press

Community Choice Energy — also known as Community Choice Aggregation — offers us the chance to bring about a historic event: the conversion of a monopoly into a competitive business.

This happened to the telephone business by breaking up Ma Bell, and to the postal system, when FedEx started up. Would we have the data plans and services, even the phones we have today, without

Since the OB Rag broke the story on July 5th about Target looking to move one of its Express stores in the current Newport Avenue Antique Center on Newport Avenue, some other local mainstream media have picked it up.

Both ABC 10 News and CBS 8 carried the story, and in doing so confirmed its validity, and both reported on the concerns of residents and other businesses about a Target Express moving onto OB’s main commercial street. Many of the comments to our original post echo the worries and feelings of dread of those quoted in the TV station accounts.

A poll on an OB facebook on the issue involving over 500 respondents resulted in 70% opposed to the store, checking the box for “Terrible. Keep OB Local.” There’s also a Keep Target Out of OB petition.

If you look closely, you can actually see gentrification in action here in Ocean Beach.

There’s at least 3 projects right now in Ocean Beach that tell the story, where the potential opportunity to build gentrifying structures and future short-term vacation rentals is just too great to resist. Check these projects out.

4651 and 4653 Orchard

A lot is going on at 4651 and 4653 Orchard. The permit was pulled by Expedited Permits of San Diego, for the property owner, Farrow Trust 11-24-15. There’s been a scope change to this project. Now, it states that the project includes permits for remodel and additions to 2 existing single dwelling units on two different lots.

For any casual passerby of the old medical and dental offices building at the corner of Cable Street and Santa Monica Avenue, it’s very obvious demolition work on the site at 1929 Cable Street has made significant progress.

It’s the one-and-only “Ocean Beach Plaza” – a coming commercial-only complex of nearly a dozen business spaces with a total of over 10,400 square feet. The owner of this near-half acre of prime OB property is John Small, a well-known and long-time Newport Avenue business and property owner. Small owns a couple of bars – Sunshine Company and Tony’s, plus other buildings on Newport Avenue.

Yet, this project is arguably one of the most important commercial developments to come to Ocean Beach in recent years.

The project was approved by the Ocean Beach Planning Board by a vote of 8 to 1 in early August 2015.

Summer is here and it’s time to take a break from my usual column and stretch the form a little with some chronicles. As I explained when I started this summer series a couple of years ago, the chronicle is a literary genre born in Brazil:

In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven-year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil [The Brazilian News] not as a reporter but as a writer of “chronicles,” a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, “allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes.

OB Entry Mural Vandalized Again
* Opinion Piece by Colleen O’Connor Takes on Faulconer Over Lack of Water for SD Trees
* McMansion in South OB for Sale for $2 Million Plus
* Tony Award-Winning Musical “Avenue Q” at the OB Playhouse
* Over-the-Line World Championship
* Mike Hess Brewery Expands to Imperial Beach
* City’s Pilot Project to Clean-Up Key Neighborhoods Includes OB and Point Loma
* Watch Your Step! – The Sidewalks of Ocean Beach & Point Loma – July 20th
* The Grunion Are Running
* Point Loma Pocket Park to Have First Workshop – July 26th
* Sliding at No-Surf Beach