‘The OB Planning Board Is There for You, Ocean Beach’

By Geoff Page

The Ocean Beach Planning Board is feeling a little like Rodney Dangerfield, “get no respect,” or like Ol’ Lonely, the Maytag repair man no one ever called because the machines never broke down. Choose your own character, the theme being a group that deserves attention but is not getting it.

The OBPB held an election last month and hardly anyone showed. The board is supposed to consist of 12 people, according to the board’s by-laws. The election resulted in a total of nine sitting members, not 12. This reflects a continued sad lack of interest. The Rag had an account of the 2023 election and things have not improved.

The truth is that planning boards are important and useful but far too few people know that or even know what a planning board is. Plus, the City of San Diego has for the last 2 years been waging a campaign to actually undermine the city’s own 42 planning committees.

This writer first became involved in a planning board in 2006. That first experience was striking. This was a real grassroots community forum that gave people a chance to speak their minds and not feel intimidated. People who ordinarily were unable to speak in public, could speak there. People looking for help or looking for information, could get that also.

These groups have been around for 40 plus years and the OBPB was the first one. That is a history to be proud of. For all those years, community volunteers have donated their time to monitor development in OB and to provide information the community needed.

Even today, OBPB members are leading the charge to make much needed changes to the Short Term Vacation Rental ordinance as recounted in last month’s Rag.

OBPB vice chair Kevin Hastings and treasurer Tracy Dezenzo have put in many hours of volunteer time to, not only to inform the community what is happening with STVRs, but to also provide serious recommendations for changes to the ordinance. These are volunteers looking out for OB, all the board members are sitting in those meetings to do just that, look out for OB.

The OBPB holds its meetings the first Tuesday of each month at the OB Rec Center. The meetings start at 6:00 p.m. and end at 8:00 p.m. To say that the meetings are informal would be an understatement. The meetings are normally relaxed, comfortable, and informative. The meetings can also become quite heated if there is a controversial item on the agenda.

One feature of every planning board meeting is the government or representatives reports section. A wide variety of government representatives attend the meetings to provide updates on what the office they represent is doing. This can include the offices of the mayor, Council District 2, county supervisor, state senate, state assembly, and the U.S. Congress.

The reports section also offers the community the opportunity to, sort of, directly question the holders of these offices, through their proxies at the meetings. Others that may also provide reports at planning board meetings are the SDPD, the Lifeguards, Housing Commission, Airport Authority, SANDAG, and the Navy.

Another regular feature of the OBPB’s meeting is non-agenda public comment, a requirement of all public meetings under the Brown Act. Anyone can step up and comment on anything as long as the subject is not one of the agenda items. People get up to criticize, to let people know about a problem, to inform the community about something that is happening, anything at all. People running for local offices such as city council use this feature to campaign sometimes.

In the first year of this writer’s planning board experience, a man got up at every meeting and used all his time to berate the board and tell them what idiots he thought they all were. The board stoically let him speak and moved on. One rule about non-agenda public comment is that no discussion is allowed, sometimes mercifully. But, it was not boring.

Usually, following the representatives reports and non-agenda comment is what has been the OBPB’s meat and potatoes, reviewing land use in the OB area. Hastings’ and Dezenzo’s efforts on reforming the STVR ordinance is a perfect example of that. OB has been disproportionately affected by the ordinance.

An item on the agenda for the April 2 meeting is another example of the land use focus:

Discussion Item #1 Blueprint San Diego

The board will do a brief overview of Blueprint San Diego and decide which section should be looked at more carefully for a future action item.

The point is that the planning board meetings can be informative, if nothing else. It is a great place to obtain information of all sorts, or even advice, because the board members come from a variety of backgrounds. There are engineers, attorneys, business owners, architects, teachers, construction professionals, artists, and others, all good sources of information.

The OBPB wants the community to want to be involved. For starters, there are three empty seats they would like to fill. The board meets once a month. A term on the board is three years. There are two committees, Project Review and Transportation that meet every other month. Sitting on the OBPB is not normally huge time commitment. Just bringing expertise to the board is a big plus for the community.

If a person does not want to sit on the board, then at least attend some meetings and see how the OBPB operates. It may not appeal to everyone, but it will certainly appeal to some, as it did to this writer years ago.

For more information about what the OBPB has done over the years, just enter “OBPB” or “Ocean Beach Planning Board” into The Rag search feature. Or go into the archives that go as far back as 2007.