OB Rag

South Bay Democrats Show the Way with Resolution in Support of a United Labor Movement

By Jim Miller

Last week, the first meeting of the newly reorganized San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council was a refreshingly upbeat gathering as the local movement recommitted itself to weathering the storm and reinventing the Labor Council as a far more democratic and activist organization that will do everything it can to engage union members and organize the unorganized.

One of the most encouraging moments of the night came when Doug Moore of the United Domestic Workers spoke about the pressing need to rebuild real, less transactional relationships with our allies in the community. This is a very good thing.

Restaurant Review

Shanghai Bun
1029 Rosecrans St.
San Diego, CA 92106
619-795-1700

If ever I wanted a restaurant to succeed this is the one. Point Loma/Ocean Beach has needed a good Chinese restaurant for years.

But let’s get one thing straight – the Shanghai Bun is not a Chinese restaurant in the true sense of the word. Rather, this is a Chinese Tapas Bar, with many Tapas, a few Chinese entrees, Seafood and Rice and Noodle offerings, a Meat and Poultry selection and a Vegetarian section offering 5 items.

There is a dessert section with 6 offerings and a lunch menu. Prices on the menu begin at $5 and the most expensive menu price is $18.

Residents Urged to Contact City Council and Mayor to Break Logjam Over Lack of Policy on STVRs

At the Wednesday, May 24th Ocean Beach Town Council forum on short-term vacation rentals, San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott faced an energized audience of some 70 residents and explained why there is a lack of enforcement against the illegal mini-hotels that have sprouted up within coastal residential zones.

Invited to the forum on the rentals, Elliott was joined by residents who have been displaced by vacation rentals and also by John Ambert, chair of the OB Planning Board, who gave an update on what the his Board has been doing.

Members of the sub-committee on short-term vacation rentals of the Ocean Beach Planning Board unveiled a new map that clearly shows the extent of the rentals across the community. The map was put together by Kevin Hastings and was first publicly shown at the OB Town Council meeting on May 24th.

Each marker on the map represents a vacation rental. The different colors represent the different online sites that lease them.

At Wednesday night’s Ocean Beach Town Council meeting, the representative from Councilwoman Lorie Zapf’s office, announced that there is potential funding for an assessment study for a new lifeguard station for Ocean Beach.

Conrad Wear told the assembled audience that Zapf’s office has determined that there is a sum of $200,000 available for a preliminary engineering assessment. And at a recent San Diego City Council Infrastructure Committee meeting, Zapf’s motion to allocate the $200,000 to begin the design process for a new OB lifeguard station – as part of the 2018 budget – was unanimously approved by the committee.

The Ocean Beach Town Council will hold a forum on short term vacation rentals tonight at its monthly meeting, – Wednesday, May 24th.

Hopefully, there will be discussions about how the hundreds of short term rentals in OB and other coastal communities are cutting into the community’s housing stock – and making rents higher and even more restrictive.

When there are hundreds of STVRs, neighborhoods are negatively impacted and disrupted, and even the character of a neighborhood can be altered.

And deep critics of short term vacation rentals understand this larger consequence, and that is it indeed, the Loss of Community that is the most dangerous aspect of this ‘home-sharing’ trend – especially at the beach.

The old adage that the cover-up is worse than the crime may once again prove true.

By Marjorie Cohn

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has responded to the crescendo of outrage by appointing former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump’’ and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation’’ as well as any other matters within the scope of the Department of Justice (DOJ) regulation on special counsel appointments.

The San Diego chapter of the Surfrider Foundation is part of the world-wide movement to ban plastic straws in restaurants, the so-called “Straw Wars” campaign, part of a wider effort to get restaurants certified as Ocean-Friendly Restaurants (OFR).

A number of OB restaurants are currently ocean-friendly, according to Surfrider.

But now we hear that 3 “high-profile” restaurants in other parts of San Diego have joined this movement to limit the number of plastic straws, many of which end up polluting our oceans and harming marine life. An estimated 500 million plastic straws are used by Americans everyday, and many of them splash down in our coastal waterways and oceans.

By Rick Jahnkow / Draft NOtices

The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) recently released a report on U.S. military personnel policy that, among other things, recommends registering women for the draft and giving all young people the military’s aptitude test when they register.

The report’s title is “Building a F.A.S.T. Force: A Flexible Personnel System for a Modern Military” (F.A.S.T stands for Fully engaged, Adaptable, Sustainable, and Technically proficient). It was created by a BPC task force that includes former Department of Defense officials, retired military officers, and several former U.S. senators.

There’s the soft opening of Ocean Beach’s new recycling center going on!

It is conveniently located cliffside, with breathtaking views.

By Geoff Page

Here is a report of the Peninsula Community Planning Board’s regular monthly meeting on Thursday, May 18, 2017.

Board Opposed to Sponsoring Town Hall Meeting on Forming Point Loma Town Council

The agenda item that seemed to have generated the most interest was a presentation on creating a town council for Point Loma. Peninsula resident Michael Winn is spearheading this effort. It appeared that this was Winn’s idea that came about because Winn and others had seen that the community planning board was unable to deal effectively with some community issues due to various restrictions the board is bound by.

This Wednesday, May 24th, the Ocean Beach Town Council will be providing a forum on the topic of short-term vacation rentals. The title of the forum is “Shorting OB Community via Short Term Vacation Rentals”.

The meeting will be held at 7:00 pm, inside the Masonic Center at 1711 Sunset Cliffs Blvd., in Ocean Beach.