The News from Pedro
So... What's been going on in or about our little burg lately.
Well, first they caught Reggie's smaller buddy, then someone (Reggie him/herself, perhaps? If an alligator can have a blatantly commercial blog, then why can't it operate a telephone and fake people out?) hoaxed his capture, and then the ever vigilant, gator watchin' media went 180, so, he's still on the lam, and possibly in line for a future job in the school mascot industry.
A dude apparently tried to scuttle his own boat in the harbor. 37 feet of raw stupid.
The lights went out, causing grown men's balls to retreat back into their loins at the fear of imaginary terrorism. Locally, the Conocco-Phillips refinery vented raw apocalypse. What did we breathe on Monday? Who knows!
The Harbor comission meeting was packed. I'll tell you one thing about the Harbor Area . people here give a shit, even if we are all crazy. Mayor Sam weighs in here, and Noel Park gives comment.
And on the deveopment front:
The YMCA got the green light on it's expansion. Hey La Rambla-ites and Young Christians! Let's see you guys get neighborly. Personally, I'm a YMCA member and think that having community facilities right in the heart of neighborhoods that use them is great.
In other development news, the IBEW is doing some picketing to make sure that the electrical at the Centre Street Lofts (funny, I don't remember Center having a n "re" in it...) gets done right by the right guys for the job.
No new Bridge to Breakwater news yet (scoping meeting tonight at 6, FYI @POC restaurant), but blogging.la contributor, San Pedro native and bridge lighting enthusiast Christiana Dominguez piped up on the issue:
Well, first they caught Reggie's smaller buddy, then someone (Reggie him/herself, perhaps? If an alligator can have a blatantly commercial blog, then why can't it operate a telephone and fake people out?) hoaxed his capture, and then the ever vigilant, gator watchin' media went 180, so, he's still on the lam, and possibly in line for a future job in the school mascot industry.
A dude apparently tried to scuttle his own boat in the harbor. 37 feet of raw stupid.
The lights went out, causing grown men's balls to retreat back into their loins at the fear of imaginary terrorism. Locally, the Conocco-Phillips refinery vented raw apocalypse. What did we breathe on Monday? Who knows!
The Harbor comission meeting was packed. I'll tell you one thing about the Harbor Area . people here give a shit, even if we are all crazy. Mayor Sam weighs in here, and Noel Park gives comment.
And on the deveopment front:
The YMCA got the green light on it's expansion. Hey La Rambla-ites and Young Christians! Let's see you guys get neighborly. Personally, I'm a YMCA member and think that having community facilities right in the heart of neighborhoods that use them is great.
In other development news, the IBEW is doing some picketing to make sure that the electrical at the Centre Street Lofts (funny, I don't remember Center having a n "re" in it...) gets done right by the right guys for the job.
No new Bridge to Breakwater news yet (scoping meeting tonight at 6, FYI @POC restaurant), but blogging.la contributor, San Pedro native and bridge lighting enthusiast Christiana Dominguez piped up on the issue:
After years of waiting, trying for, and dreaming of a major waterfront redevelopment, it seems that San Pedrans might finally be getting what they want. At least, what most of us want.
Unfortunately, most of us are the strong, silent type.
The project, Bridge to Breakwater, will reunite Angelenos with their waterfront - giving us miles of strolling and jogging paths, planned, sensible retail and restaurant development, and tax revenue.
5 Comments:
Well, the meeting was surprisingly well-attended, given the snappy name that they gave it and the advertising blitz that accompanied it.
I'll skip the first part of the meeting, which consisted of some consultants standing in front of signs offering to answer questions about specific concerns--noise, historic buildings, traffic, etc. I've been to enough of these meetings by now to have had most of my questions answered, so I just stood around and had some fruit salad.
The real meeting was afterward, next door. Following a brief, uninformative presentation by the POLA, the microphone was turned over to public comment. And boy, did the public comment.
The predominant theme of the evening was the port's failure to listen. Commenter after commenter hit the mike, and while they had varying ideas about what sort of open space is desirable along the waterfront--wetlands? athletic fields? passive parks? youth sailing programs?--the vast majority of them were enthusiastic about open space, and notably less so about commercial development (with some openly hostile to the latter). Even those who supported some development tended to think that the port's proposal was either too big, or didn't adequately take into account actual demand rather than speculate about imaginary future demand, or both. Several of the commenters pointed out that they've been trying, in meeting after meeting, to get the Port to understand that the proposed project is way out of line with what Pedro residents want or asked for, and that the Port has perversely responded to this by suddenly coming up with a "Maximum Development Alternative" containing even more great big buildings.
Of the people who commented on the microphone, and I lost count of how many there were in all, I counted a grand total of two who were actively in favor of the port's proposal or who favored even more development: Christiana Dominguez, and some wingnut who--I'm not making this up--advocates a casino on the waterfront and who holds up Hong Kong--I swear I'm not making this up--as an example of the sort of development San Pedro ought to emulate. Dominguez complained that if she wants to shop, she has to drive to Torrance or Santa Monica. Fair enough, although she, like many who make this argument, doesn't seem to understand that there are other ways to bring shopping opportunities to a community than massive big-box development. After that, she veered into a sort of bizarre spiel about how parks and trees are just too darned expensive to maintain without a huge retail complex to generate funds to pay for their upkeep--apparently, according to her, we live in the wrong sort of biome to sustain trees and other parky junk like that. I'm not sure why she threw that in, except possibly to show off her education in front of us slope-browed Archie Bunker types, because it didn't seem entirely apposite; and funnily enough, on the way to the meeting I passed by Sunken City, where trees have been living for years and years without anybody from the Port of Los Angeles coming over to water them. Perhaps nobody informed them that they were living in the wrong biome? And hey, it's not like the Port has any other sources of revenue with which to fund parks and other mitigating projects like that, right? It's gotta be a big ol' mall, or nothing!
Yeesh. Well, enough about Dominguez. Except that it is kind of amusing to see a self-professed Democrat employing a classic Nixonian defense as to why the great hordes of B2B supporters arent't speaking up. And her smearing of the opponents of the project in her blog--rather than people with legitimate concerns about overdevelopment, we're all clearly a bunch of seriously mean-spirited people who actively want to harm our own town--is pure Rove.
Anyway, we'll see whether the POLA finally listens to what people are trying to tell it. If this doesn't work, maybe I'll show up at the next meeting with a briefcase full of money and just shower them with it as I speak. Do you think they'd listen to me then?
I'll never understand why people would choose to live in a place like San Pedro and work to change it into Hong Kong. Or Torrance.
Well, I guess I do understand - they own a lot of property or run businesses here and want to become incredibly rich very soon, and all of these troublesome "community" types are standing in the way of their champagne wishes and caviar dreams.
How dare you! Let the poor bastards build their Xanadu! Is there no justice?!
...and isn't scuttling your boat right in the harbor kind of like murdering someone on the steps of the police station?
Whatever happened to criminal masterminds? The world is going to hell.
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