OB Rag

It was one of those articles that after you read it, you have to go back and re-read it because what it describes doesn’t make sense. This was what happened when I first read Craig Gustafson’s June 13th article in the San Diego U-T about San Diego’s ambulance service – how they bilked the City out of $18 million but get to keep operating ambulances for us – and are able to increase their fees to San Diego residents – the users of ambulances.

After a series of public meetings that began in February, the County’s Redistricting Advisory Committee voted Monday [June 13] to forward three proposed redistricting plans to the Board of Supervisors. The citizen’s committee was tasked with gathering public input and forwarding no more than three plans for the Board’s consideration. The Redistricting Advisory Committee finished that work and held its final meeting Monday.

The Board of Supervisors is expected to hear the committee’s proposed plans at its regular Board meeting at 9 a.m. on June 28.

Conservation groups and a Native American tribe sued San Diego County’s environmental agency to stop a proposed dump they claim will harm endangered species habitat, a critical drinking water source and sacred tribal sites.

The lawsuit filed Monday by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, RiverWatch and the Pala Band of Mission Indians argues that the Department of Environmental Health violated state laws when it permitted the proposed Gregory Canyon landfill.

Editor: Hugh Moore is the Chair of the San Diego Green Party.

An Open Letter to the California Democratic Party:

By Hugh Moore, RN, / June 13, 2011

I’m a registered nurse who works in a hospital that serves the disenfranchised and sees every day the damage that the lack of a healthcare system causes. So when I heard that the California Democratic Party had added the principle of healthcare as a right rather than an option of all people I was ecstatic.

We have to hand it to our big-sibling weekly newspaper, The Reader. They’ve discovered an errant street sign in Ocean Beach. Or rather their new guy, Dave Rice – who also is one of our bloggers -, found it. It’s a street sign of the new, blue type that the City has been installing for a while now. But this one, at the corner of Santa Monica Avenue and Bacon Street …. is misspelled.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing

“Hey, dude, that’s wack!”

I learned that handy little colloquialism during my first semester at Cal State San Marcos. “Wack,” according to the fellow who uttered it (a comely young man who was conscripted into a women’s studies class), is an adjective indicating that something is not right. After doing a little etymological digging, I found that “wack” is a variant of “whack,” which means “crazy” and is commonly used in conjunction with “job,” as in …

by George J. Janczyn / Groksurf’s San Diego /June 14, 2011 [updated June 15]

As predicted here one year ago (“San Diego County Water Authority water pricing lawsuit could jeopardize funding for Carlsbad Desalination Plant“), the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) has moved to terminate an agreement that would have paid a subsidy of $250 per acre foot (potentially $14M annually) to Posiedon and the San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) for water produced at the Carlsbad Desalination Plant.

by Lucas O’Connor / Two Cathedrals

The first draft of state redistricting maps were released and approved [June 10th]. There will still be revisions, but this should be relatively close to what we’re dealing with. Flash analysis, roughly based on current numbering and roughly South to North.

If Palomar Mountain State Park is closed, as the gov wants to do, our big state will really not save all that much from its closure. According to Roy Sterns, Deputy Director of Communications for the California State Parks, California will only save less than $160,000 a year by closing Palomar Mountain State Park. That isn’t much for one of the grandest natural treasures San Diego County currently claims.

As you have probably heard, Governor Jerry Brown wants to shut down 70 state parks up and down California in light of the state’s budget crisis. The parks slated for closure would meet the governor’s $22 million budget cuts. These include Palomar Mountain State Park here in our county.

Last week was a milestone in journalism, as the Huffington Post exceeded the New York Times in Web traffic and cemented its role as a main rival to the Gray Lady. It was also noted that the combined AOL-Huffington Post newsroom staff of 1,300 people is now bigger than the Times’ 1,200 person newsroom staff. While much of the debate about the rivalry has focused on Huffington Post’s adoption of savvy Internet tactics versus the much more old-school New York Times, very little of the discussion has focused on where the two newsroom differ the most: their labor practices.

Remember when I wrote this article about Gaston, our mail man. Here is the latest news about him:

His daughter, Maiah Gianna was born on March 22, 2011. She weighed in at 6.75 pounds and was tiny at 18″. The post office offers a “twelve week bonding period” to get to know your child.

In our coverage of SlutWalk San Diego we’ve noted the number of young people involved in this event. I want to give a more formal introduction to two of the young women that were involved in organizing this the movement in San Diego.