OB Rag

By Geoff Page

The event noticed here in the OB Rag on Tuesday, May 23rd, titled the “OB Pier Update & Discussion” came off as advertised. It was sponsored by the Ocean Beach Town Council and held at the Point Loma/Hervey Branch Library. As noted in The Rag “(and there’s plenty of parking),” was accurate, but plenty went unoccupied.

The advance notice for this gathering was, unfortunately, not well done as evidenced by the attendance. There were 12 people at the live event and three more attending virtually. While the OBTC’s effort was well-intentioned, the result was a missed opportunity, not a total loss, but underwhelming.

There’s been a battle going on over the future of northeast Mission Bay for at least the last 7 years, but just recently in what the U-T described as “a powerful backlash this spring from tennis players, golfers, boating clubs, campers and supporters of youth sports,” this new push-back appears to be on the late side.

Folks in this backlash claim that “the city’s plan to replace some recreational areas with hundreds of acres of climate-friendly marshland threatens vital local institutions that have been part of San Diego’s civic fiber for more than 50 years.

It’s a sad but predictable truth, that the local planning boards of Point Loma — Ocean Beach, Peninsula and Midway — are faltering before our very eyes. And it’s all due to the city of San Diego’s neglect.

Take the following as prima facie evidence of this maddening trend.

Ocean Beach Planning Board

The OB Board has been struggling this past year in maintaining enough members to serve. At their May 3 monthly meeting, “there were only eight of ten board members attending for a board this is supposed to have 16 members,” as Rag reporter Geoff Page observed. Getting OBceans to turn out for their annual elections has also been a challenge over the last several years, not discounting the pandemic.

And despite a potentially controversial or contentious issue of planned roundabouts on Bacon Street on the agenda, Page reported, “There was only one person in the audience during the board meeting besides this writer and the District 2 representative.”

By Gary Warth / San Diego Union-Tribune / May 23, 2023

A divided county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday agreed to authorize up to $32 million in loans toward the city of San Diego’s potential purchase of four residential properties that could be used to house more than 300 homeless people.

The city’s Housing Commission is considering buying the properties with money from the state’s Project Homekey program, and the purchases are contingent on receiving the grants.

By Ernie McCray

Hey,
LAY THOSE PISTOLS DOWN, Ja!
Enough of
all that jive foolishness,
flashing guns on videos
as though you’re a gangster wannabe
or some kind of an OG.
If it’s attention you want
you’ve already got that,
it seems to me,
because on a basketball court
your fans eat up
your razzle and dazzle
and wizardry and artistry
with unadulterated glee.

Wesley Hill, a 25-year resident of Ocean Beach, is upset. While riding the Ocean Beach bike path on his bicycle, after dodging trash and debris from homeless encampments along the pathway, he ran into a skateboard, crashed head first, cracking some teeth and costing him dental bills.

Hill told Brian White of CBS8:

“The bike path has been a mess for months, if not years. Encampments, other people using it to do drugs, it’s become a public toilet. Frequently, you see shopping carts all over the place.”

By Justin Brooks / SD U-T OpEd / May 19, 2023

In 1995, I read a newspaper article about a young woman in her early 20s named Marilyn Mulero. Marilyn was awaiting execution in Illinois after being convicted of a double homicide.

The article said she was sentenced to death on a plea bargain, but I didn’t think that could be accurate. How could anyone be sentenced to death on a plea bargain? A plea bargain is supposed to be a bargain — meaning you give up your right to a trial in exchange for a lesser sentence. Death is the most severe punishment the government can dole out.

At the time I read about Marilyn, I was a law professor teaching and living in Michigan.

I felt a deep need to find out more about her case, so I set up a meeting with her and drove hundreds of miles to the prison where she was housed in rural Illinois.

The San Diego City Council on Monday, May 22, “reluctantly” consented to new California Coastal Commission regulations that will require restaurant owners in the city’s coastal zone to replace any lost parking spaces taken up by outdoor dining areas they operate on the street, as reported by Lori Weisberg at the U-T.

What is affected is a narrow strip of coastal zone known as the “beach impact area,” defined as a stretch of coastline that begins at the northern end of Torrey Pines State Reserve and runs about 15 miles south to Sunset Cliffs Natural Park. And the boundary extends inland approximately a quarter of a mile or more for much of the zone.

Everyone’s invited to the “OB Pier Update & Discussion” at the Ocean Beach Town Council meeting, Wednesday, May 24th at 7 PM. The meeting will be held at the Point Loma/Hervey Branch Library, at 3701 Voltaire Street –(and there’s plenty of parking).

The public May Town Council meeting will be “a session wholly dedicated to discussions surrounding the future of our beloved OB Pier,” as an announcement for the meeting stated.

The agenda will cover:

• an update from the City of San Diego about the current status of the pier,

The father of a Point Loma teen severely injured in a hit-and-run incident led a “community-wide detective squad” to find and locate an Ocean Beach person suspected of causing the incident.

Tim Ash is the father of Alex who was wrapping up a ride on his E-bike on Catalina Blvd on a recent Friday night when he was hit by an SUV that then took off. Alex fractured his pelvis in 3 places and he had internal bleeding in his bladder which was life-threatening. After his son was injured and hospitalized Tim and other family members and friends went to work, in search of the SUV, believed to be a black Jeep Grand Cherokee.

By Colleen O’Connor

All your enemies
Have opened their mouths wide against you;
They hiss and gnash their teeth.
They say, “We have swallowed her up!
Surely this is the day for which we waited; (From the Bible: Lamentations 2:16)

But, they have not swallowed her up.  Not Senator Diane Feinstein, not Nancy Pelosi, her neighbor of 30 years, and not Pelosi’s eldest caregiving daughter, Nancy Corinne Prowda.

For months, the GOP, many self-important, ineffectual politicians and op/ed columnists have railed against Senator Feinstein, demanding her resignation and heaping scorn on those who protected, sheltered, and cared for a woman who is elderly, recently recovering from shingles and its maladies.