By Geoff Page
The Keystone Kops. Who’s on first? The inmates are running the asylum. Take your pick, all of them describe the City of San Diego’s Monday, June 24, presentation of its Coastal Resilience Master Plan ideas for Ocean Beach and Point Loma.
Where to start. The city has planned a series of workshops to present it’s ideas on ways to deal with sea level rise and climate change. The workshop planned to discuss, specifically, Ocean Beach and Sunset Cliffs was originally scheduled for June 24. At the Pacific Beach library on Cass Street. Pacific Beach, to discuss Ocean Beach.
The Rag fanned the flames of indignation and the city, made aware of this logistical miscalculation by angry OBceans, changed the venue to the OB Rec Center. It seems the people running this show had no idea that OBceans and Sunset Cliffs residents would be bothered about having to drive to Pacific Beach, to talk about OB. Myopic, to put it mildly.
Then, once pointed in the right direction, it became clear that the people from the city had no knowledge of the Rec Center. One has to wonder if anyone from the city checked out the Rec Center in advance of the meeting.
When this writer heard about this change, the first thought was a hope that the city would use the large gymnasium for the meeting and not the room the Ocean Beach Planning Board meets in. For one thing, that room is not large at all. The public alerted the city to its interest in this meeting by dragging it back to OB. It would seem logical to have expected a crowd.
In addition to a size problem, the OBPB meeting room, on the west side of the Rec Center, is more than uncomfortably hot in the summer. Anyone having attended OBPB meetings in that room during the summer can easily attest to that.
Knowing the interest, publicly demonstrated, for this meeting, the idea of holding it in the usual OBPB meeting room just seemed too absurd for consideration.
Absurd it may have been, but that did not stop the city from making another bonehead mistake. Arriving at the Rec Center shortly before 5:00, it was immediately clear the gymnasium was not the location. There were four men playing basketball there. At the end of the hall was the OBPB meeting room, stuffed with people. More people spilled into the hallway unable to enter the room, much less find a seat.
It was unbearably hot and not even any fans to keep the air moving. When you add high temperatures and a roomful of human beings giving off heat, you have such discomfort that it is difficult to think straight. This was simply idiotic.
One lady jumped up and raked the city over the coals – no pun intended – for disrespecting the people of OB by holding the meeting in that small room instead of reserving the gym that is much cooler and bigger. She gave it to them for maybe 30 seconds and received an ovation from the room when she finished.
The city’s people basically said they did not know. That, of course, was the problem, they did not know OB and did not at least scout the location before holding the meeting.
There were three or four people from the city presenting the ideas for protecting the coastline and other improvements. They ran through a slide show that had very little information about what specific ideas were planned for OB and Sunset Cliffs. They said there was more detail on the website.
Despite a diligent search of the website , the specific details of what ideas they have, such as the permanent dune in OB and the temporary one-way section of Sunset Cliffs Blvd., could not be found. The site contains survey buttons to get public input on Tourmaline Beach, Sunset Cliffs, Ocean Beach, La Jolla Shores, Mission Beach, and “All Sites.”
The surveys asks what the person taking the survey thinks of the design. But, with the designs nowhere to be seen, the survey is ineffectual. It is not clear if this is some kind of computer glitch. Who’s on first?
The Rag has already provided a better accounting of what is in this master plan than the city website does.
After the presentation, the plan was to gather public input in the workshop portion of the meeting. One has to admire the folks who stuck it out in that heat and sat around tables discussing the design ideas from the city. This writer was not one of those people. The city plans to gather the input and then, do something with it. Whether or not the city shares that input with the larger public is a crap shoot.
KUSI News did send a camera man to record some of the meeting. If there was an actual reporter as well, it was not evident.
A kayak for every driveway! Sea level rise? Just hold it back! Build multi story towers with ferry service to higher ground! City leaders will lead the way, don’t you fear!
. . . yet another dysfunctional community event fiasco, courtesy of our beloved City of San Diego – America’s Finest City.
Dan Platt from KUSI was outside interviewing people as they came out. According to him, the City Staff would not talk to him.
I believe you meant Dan Plante. I’m sorry I missed him. I don’t understand why the city would not talk to him, makes no sense.
I can’t find the KUSI news report about the workshop. Anyone else see anything?
I looked and also could not find it.
I walked out of the meeting with my daughter and her friend just before 6 and Dan was out front. Talked with him for a couple minutes and he asked if I would go on and talk- it was a live shot close to top of the hour- 6:04ish. He was more focused on the Sunset Cliffs one way than the beach berm/walkway. Not finding it on the website.
When has the city been concerned about what happens in Ocean Beach and our council person really sucks
If you actually click on the survey links then you will see preliminary illustrations. This is the input gathering phase, there are no designs yet. Guess your search and reporting wasn’t that diligent. As one of the few standing the whole time, the City absolutely should have done better planning for this event, but it would have also been great if some people were more considerate to other residents and let us get through the presentation and have the charette discussion.
I’d like to know what link you went to with survey links and preliminary illustrations. It would be useful for everyone. All I get each time I hit the survey button is the survey, no designs.
And, yes, there are preliminary, conceptual designs for Sunset Cliffs Blvd. and OB, I’ve seen some of them. They showed one at the meeting, the sand berm in OB.
I also stood the whole time.
And, yes, some people did interrupt rudely, but it showed the depth of enmity toward the city.
Thank you for reporting on this Geoff. I’m a little tired of these crafty names. “Complete Communities,” “Coastal Resilience Master Plan.” Why doesn’t the City just name a scheme “We will tyrannically make plans for WTF we want to” and then everything the City declares as official plans will fall under that scheme?
I also stayed for the whole meeting, and I feel the city representative did a decent job of throwing out his agenda and listening to the comments from the gathered throngs. I was lucky to be sitting next to the consultant and witnessed that he really was listening to comments from attendants, some of which were off-line and just to him.
I was disappointed that most of the discussion centered on current problems (like van-campers, naughty tourists, lack of enforcement, etc.) rather than
a plan to respond to sustainability in the face of sea-level rise, which was the subject of the project and of the potential funding.
It appears that the work so far is based on existing shoreline elevations which are ephemeral and will change with sea level rise as MLLW changes. The solutions seem to be an effort to stand in the way of the ocean, which never works long-term. In the long term the ocean will win, and anything we try to place in its path will be be temporary at best and require huge maintenance costs to keep it in place. That is not sustainable.
Also, several old-timers have described to me the fact that there used to be a lot more sandy beaches below the cliffs before the rip-rap jetties to the north and a lot of rip-rap/seawalls were constructed. Shouldn’t we have learned something from that?
That is a shame to hear the discussion got so far off track as you related, Lyle. I would put that too at the feet of the city. A meeting with that many emotional people requires a polite, but firm hand to keep everyone on track. Letting it get away like that defeats the purpose.
Since I did not know what MLLW was, I looked it up:
MLLW stands for Mean Lower Low Water, which is a tidal datum defined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It is the average height of the lowest tide recorded at a tide station each day over a 19-year period called the National Tidal Datum Epoch (NTDE), which ran from 1983–2001. MLLW is dependent on locality and can be used for safe navigation of boats.
I think, in retrospect, that the first sentence in my third paragraph was confusing and un-necessary. What I didn’t think of was that even though MLLW based on the above definition will change, MLLW for surveyors will not. (per NOAA, “The geodetic datum is fixed and does not take into account the changing stands of sea level.”)
It is good to understand the use of the datum, since it is used for tide tables and for land elevations. So if your home is on land at 10 feet “above sea level” and the tide is at 6 feet, your home is 4 feet above the water, and your drainage pipes are pretty close to being beneath the water.
Thanks for providing that necessary explanation. I don’t think many people see the difference between “sea level” and high or low tides.
I was disappointed that in the entire room there were only 3 people who made any comments about the boardwalk/natural berm that would stretch from dog beach to the pier. This plan affects the usage and visibility of the coastline in the core of OB and has a large impact on protecting our town from sea level rise than turning a highly trafficked street into a one way road. Most of the privileged people in attendance didn’t seem to give a rats butt about the environment, and only cared about having more cars potentially traveling on their “side” streets and mitigating badly behaved visitors.
Sad and disappointing
Did our San Diego mayor and City staff consult with the Mayor of Imperial Beach, who did a big study 7 years ago on coastal protection/preservation? What all happened down in IB with their study/lawsuit/plans?
https://obrag.org/2017/09/obceans-urged-to-push-san-diego-into-joining-lawsuit-against-big-polluters/