City Playbook No Surprise

A Leucadia Blog double agent has turned over the City of Encinitas P.R. playbook. It is most important document at city hall, because its the only document actually followed by management. Page 3 deals with how to deal with sensitive issues.

Duck
Don't say anything. The problem will go away most of the time if you just don't say anything about the problem. Definitely, don't talk to the press. This works 95% of the time.

Deflect
Make the problem into a wedge issue that is only tangentially related to the problem. The public will get confused and will only follow the easy sound bites. Watch out for the reporters who keep their eye on the ball. Call their bosses and complain. Just wear them out.

Detonate
If citizens keep bringing up the problem, continue to ignore the issue but disparage the citizens. The public won't even listen to the message if they don't like messenger. Encinitas residents know they can trust elected officials and city staff more than citizens with nothing better to do. Try to recruit and befriend a few political hit men that you use for this task.

Deny
Just lie. 90% of the time no one will notice, care or remember. The press won't follow the story for long if you get caught and the public won't remember. How many times did Dalager misrepresent the library and Hall park projects? Don't remember. You see the point.

Toxic Soils Not Funny

Parkwood Ave is adjacent to the toxic soils ground zero.

Here is what the neighbors along Parkwood are saying.

Several families have evacuated their homes. This is a big commitment and not done lightly. One person became seriously ill, several others developed lesions, and at least two others complained of feeling ill.

We got this almost two weeks ago from J. McGill:

We have had to move out of our home on the advice of Poison Control, my children’s pediatrician and a toxicology specialist.  All of our neighbors who were home at the time of the grading have been affected as well but we have not gotten answers from the developer, City Ventures, their environmental consultants, Stantec, the City of Encinitas, the SD County of Environmental Health or SD County of Air Pollution Control.  The standard response is that there is no data that indicates that we should be affected and suggest that we are just worried because of the health advisory sign posted at the front of the development.  That is not the case.  We are following up with our toxicologist this week and are looking to get our property tested as I fear it was contaminated with Dieldrin (found in high concentrations in various parts of the property) and possibly other pesticides that blew over during the grading process. 

So, you still think all these folks are hysterical? There was a plan in place that was approved by the county and the city. How could they get sick?

The builder was not watering all the soil that was being moved and the neighbors say the site was a dust bowl, with clouds of dust visibly drifting off-site, according to the neighbors. Well, so far we have not been able to get photos of this dust bowl, but the neighbors say the evacuees took photos. We're working on getting a photo.  



QUESTION. Who was responsible to ensure the contractor was following the rules? It is a pain to find certain documents on the city's website, so we looked at the Hall park EIR for an answer (click to enlarge):

 ANSWER. Looks like the city.


The city and developer should hold a public meeting to tell the neighbors what has happened, and if there is a reason to act, what the plan of response will be.

That's not likely to happen. The city turned a blind eye to the contamination of the Hall property, until the neighbors paid for an independent environmental assessment. Dalager and Stocks were strongly dismissive of the soils contamination. Worse, the city didn't do its homework or adequately disclose to the public all the problems with the Hall park before they bonded and overpaid for the property. There is one major public relations reason to blow off Parkwood residents.

Thou Shall Discuss Numbers in Public

The LA Times is serious about open government. They have a decent hub for public documents here.

From the LA Times:

Since the pub­lic cor­rup­tion scan­dal broke last sum­mer in the city of Bell, hun­dreds of read­ers have voiced con­cerns to The Times about po­ten­tial prob­lems at the gov­ern­ment agen­cies in their com­munit­ies. The Times en­cour­ages read­ers to share gov­ern­ment re­cords you con­sider news­worthy or in­ter­est­ing. Send us doc­u­ments and a Times staffer will re­view them and post them to this site, which also in­cludes files ob­tained by our re­port­ers.

Notice how the times says, SINCE the story broke in the city of Bell concerns have poured in. The same thing happened at the Attorney General's Office. According to public affairs officer the AG was sent over 1000 complaints. Apparently, the public did not believe the AG (or the LA Times) were that interested or motivated to investigate possible problems. Investigations take much more effort than printing press releases of celebrities and politicians.

The elected officials and, increasingly, the public servant corps are happiest when the public is absolutely ignorant of what is happening in government.

What the LA Times is doing is great, but you can't share public records if the city keeps the records a secret (ex roads report,  applications, disciplinary reports).

The times does remind us about:

Cit­izens keep an eye out for per­son­nel eval­u­ations con­duc­ted in closed ses­sions. Jen­kins said fre­quent or on­go­ing eval­u­ation of a top staff mem­ber, such as a city man­ager, would be un­usu­al. New­ton said that any time a body moves to make an ap­point­ment or to hire a new em­ploy­ee, there must be a pub­lic dis­cus­sion of that per­son’s com­pens­a­tion. “There has to be an open and pub­lic dis­cus­sion about com­pens­a­tion,” he said.

Leucadia to Council: We expect to hear a healthy dialogue on staff compensation in the coming months, otherwise we are going to wonder if the real deal had been worked out at some backyard BBQ. That would be against the law.

Hidden Leucadia

More Woosies Avoiding the Press

Complaints of illness spread across Leucadia.

Channel 7 is running coverage of the Hymettus development. Watch the crack reporting here. 

If you were a middle aged two-bit divorced male developer would you return her calls? All this concern about toxic dust sounded totally koo-koo until the developer started running for cover and hiding from the press.

Leucadia was home to dozens of greenhouse operations.

Workers' Privacy Rights Trampled by Fox News, Department Heads

Fox News reports that the FAA Chief has shown command deficiency and totally disregard for employee privacy.

The nation's top aviation official says he has suspended a control tower supervisor while investigating why no controller was available to aid two planes that landed at Washington's Reagan airport early this week.

Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Randy Babbitt said Thursday in a statement that the controller has been suspended from his operational duties. He said he was "personally outraged" that the supervisor, the lone controller on duty in the airport tower at the time, failed to meet his duties.

On condition of anonymity, one FAA employee stated, "the staff is outraged at Babbitt for confirming this incident happened because he has started an unfair precedent of being open with the public. If the public finds out how often this happens, we'll have to start sleeping at home."

Leucadia Action

Even the kids in Leucadia empower themselves to take action to help out fellow humans.

Bake sale to help Japan.

Credit: Chris

Public Health Issues Always Dismissible

This is Leucadia and everyone in Leucadia is crazy. This is Encinitas and everyone knows that city hall likes to bury their problems.

SD City Beat Greenhouse Soil Blamed by Neighbors for Illness

What they didn’t foresee was the danger of building on land steeped in pesticides. It was widely known that the soil contained high levels of dieldrin, an insecticide. City Ventures proposed to bury the contaminated earth. The city of Encinitas conducted an environmental study and determined that, with City Ventures’ remediation plan, the project “will not adversely affect the health, safety or general welfare of the community.”

However, during the last two weeks, as many as 16 people in the neighborhood have come down ill, complaining of a variety of symptoms that are consistent with exposure to dieldrin. 

“Dizziness and disorientation, sore throat, blisters and rashes, vomiting, severe headaches and nausea,” says Frank Delahoyde, an analyst at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, whose home backs up to the project, in an emailed statement. “And it is the ones that stay at home that have become the sickest. I’m gone for most of the day, but have experienced unusual coughing in the mornings before I leave for work.”

He adds that one of his dogs stopped eating and began experiencing seizures. His family—and his dog—have temporarily moved to alternative housing, along with several other residents. Maria Lindsay, another resident, tells CityBeat she has moved to a hotel after testing positive for dieldrin in her body.

 See Also: Buyer's Delight

Historic Leucadia Buildings

The Encinitas Historical Society ran an article on one of Leucadia's oldest and coolest homes in their Spring edition of Little Oaks newsletter.

The log cabin home is found on Hymettus Ave.

It was built in the mid 1920's using cedar telephone poles. It was built by Miles Kellogg who also built the boathouses. In 1930, the owner cut down 30+ eucalyptus trees and plants and orchard of avocados. Those trees were still productive until at least the 90's, and if root rot hasn't gotten to them they may still be productive today.

Buildings, and history, like that bring value to the Hymettus neighborhood. They are symbolic of who we are.

If you are not a member of the Encinitas Historical Society, membership is a bargain. Sign up here.

Library Comment

Libraries have taken on many roles these days. The Nixon library is as much a monument and museum.

The LA Times just ran an article on the the new exhibits at that library that remind us that even those in the highest power can't always be trusted to do the right thing when seeking to maintain personal power.

The library is a giant lesson in the mistake of trying to cover up errors. Nixon, "Its not the crime that kills you, its the cover up." While the deed may have only implicated a few, cover ups often require a much broader group of people to act, even if only by omission.

The new Nixon exhibit is titled dirty tricks.

More important than going back over Nixon's misdeeds is telling this part of the story, ran by NPR.

That scheme, and many others hatched by Nixon, never happened, says Naftali, because people in the government said no, "people who received orders that they would not, could not implement.

"That is a story that must be remembered. That is something that we have to teach students and future members of our government," says Naftali, "that you can say no when you're asked to do something that is unconstitutional or illegal [or unethical]."

That mostly untold part of the story is the part of those who put doing the right thing ahead of their fear of being kicked out of the political crony club. In hindsight, they must realize that they even their own personal interests were improved because they would have been caught up in the Nixon scandal.

The public and public employees should seek to foster and promote checks and balances in the system to make it harder for elected officials to even consider putting the public interest second to grabs at personal power. There are lots of ways to do that at the local level.

Jim Bond, Forward Thinker

When the city went big on the new library Jim Bond was ridiculed for questioning the role of libraries in the new century. He said we were overbuilding or overspending on a a fancy community coffeehouse. A taxpayer funded Barnes and Noble with a million dollar view.


San Diego's Investigative Rag Quote:

...Encinitas deputy mayor James Bond, who was less than enthusiastic about the building of his community’s elegant new library, calling it a potential “dinosaur” and saying that “in ten years, nobody will be making a trip to the library. We will be looking at a PalmPilot or a computer at home.”

Patch just ran a blurb on the library's  killer coffee cart. You can drink your nice coffee, watch the sunset and check out the city hall roof from the million dollar patio.

 Credit: Art and Enviro Politics Blog

The library was stamped environmentally friendly, just like everything else that is green-ganded these days.

Bond was before his time. Newport beach just opened a "library" with no books. Newport Beach more forward thinking than Encinitas?

 Is reading bad for the environment?

The library also functions as a cool art house. Now on display are mosaics.

Praise and Concern for EFD Management

From the Coast News Commentary

I want to thank Fire Chief Muir and his staff for an excellent and informative presentation on the issues being brought before counsel. He and his staff brought clarity to this matter with in-depth research using empirical data.

The chief and his staff were clear about the issues at hand; the areas of Olivenhain noted “in red” are at extreme risk of inadequate fire and life safety response times.

 Leuadia was looking a little orange-red in the northern parts.

 The chief was quick to document that simply shifting the proposed construction of the coastal located Fire Station 1 from its currently planned location to an area within “the red zone” would immediately provide an equitable distribution of life/safety services for all of Encinitas and its outlying communities.

Why not have a 6th fire station if public safety is the council's priority? We've got gazillions of dollars for recreation. 

Given the fact that Chief Muir’s presentation documented the areas of “Encinitas proper” experience a response time from four to six minutes AND the areas of Olivenhain are recorded to have times in excess of 14 minutes not only puts that area at risk but certainly poses a liability to the city itself.

Is the city liable for not providing adequate sports fields? Is the city liable for Leucadia's flooding?

The chief’s presentation predicatively forecasted that by simply shifting Fire Station 1, an equitable and reasonable response time of six minutes would be experienced throughout the entire area from which you reside, represent and control.

Why reduce response times for anyone? Firestation 6 should be made to fit in with the surrounding Olivenhain estates. It will need a huge swimming pool and tanning deck.

It would be very difficult to understand any decision by counsel that doesn’t protect and serve the life and fire safety of our community, including that of The Colony of Olivenhain, which resides within the city of Encinitas. We are contributors to the general fund out here in “The Red Zone.” Our community of 66 homes alone contributes in excess of $2 million in property taxes annually. We are more than willing to contribute in anyway reasonably possible to assist the council members into ensuring these essential services are provided to our community.

That $2 million was smoked by a couple department heads.

Thanks for your time and willingness to serve.

cory.crommett

Encinitas (City Hall) Forecast

Patch Op-Ed: Is Local Government Hiding the Sunshine?

Yes, most of the time, the city follows the law. Most of the time, there is no reason for the city to manipulate information being made available to the public, but the weather forecast for City Hall is always a chance of fog. Don’t assume sunshine. If you are asking about something sensitive, expect the marine layer to penetrate local government.

The biggest problem is that it's really tough to know what the city has withheld from its citizens. The city takes advantage of the public’s trust. There are many examples of things that have been withheld from the public that are known to have existed.

Here is a small sample picked from a large pool: READ MORE

 

Cardiff Envy

 Cardiff gets world famous art. Leucadia gets tree stumps.