Illegal Alien Labor & Ecke Ranch

Ecke Ranch has always been a mecca for illegal aliens. When I was a little kid I remember riding my dirt bike on the trails of what is now the shopping center and seeing the large migrant worker camp.

I wonder how much money the Eckes have saved in tax free low cost labor over the decades?

I wonder how many of those illegal aliens ever received free medical care from Scripps at the taxpayer's expense?

I wonder how many of those illegal aliens committed petty to serious crimes against the legal citizens?

Is that how the Eckes became millionaires? By employing a cash under the table labor force?

We know one thing for sure, none of those workers were "coddled".

Yup, the Eckes are true local hero's

Baby Steps Towards Improving Leucadia

Now that total redevelopment is dead a lot of long overdue improvements are finally being done. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about work getting put on hold over the years in order to make Leucadia seem "blighted".

The little Leucadia Wino Park has new sod and other improvements and the street going up to the Beacon's beach parking lot has been repaved. I'm happy about that.

Jack Orr Lives In Oceanside, Chimes in about Leucadia

Jack Orr gives some to the Sheridan development opposition in a letter to the NCT.
NCT link

Isn't Jack Orr the campaign manager for Jerome Stocks new run at State Assembly?

Here is a photo of Andrew. The City gave Ecke-Meyer a couple
feet of the street so that they could get more building space and maybe more houses.

They approved this by calling it "street improvements"

It double sucks because the Barratt/Meyer development will not have
street parking (so that streets can be more narrow and Barratt can
get more buildable space), and thus all the overload parking will
be out on Andrew in front of the neighbor's houses. What strike is that Mr. Orr?

Ecke Re-Education Camps Begin

Today is the first in a series of tours of Ecke Ranch. Right now 100 of our fellow citizens are learning about the most important thing in the Encinitas microverse, the holy poinsettia.



Paul Ecke III?



You will vote yes on prop. A

Don't be suprised if later today you see someone running through the woody show screaming this.

Downtown Encinitas Rakes In 29 Meeellion Bucks!

DEMA link

The most important part of the press release is this:

Encinitas is unique in the fact that it is one of the few cities in San Diego County without a redevelopment agency. Typically, cities rely on redevelopment agencies and economic development agencies in many case both, to "redevelop" older section of their cities that are for whatever reason less viable than before, and suffering through "consumer neglect" resulting in deteriorating sales tax and other problems requiring increased city services.

18 years ago, Encinitas opted for a different way, it signed up for a pilot program through the State of California and the National Trust for Historic Preservation to be a designated Mainstreet city. Mainstreet is a strategy developed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation that seeks to use preservation and incremental improvements focused on the inherent strengths of a district and its stakeholders, to promote a "restoration" of the vitality of the district.

If only poor "blighted" Leucadia had been so lucky.

Eminent Domain in Olivenhain!

NCT story by Adam Kaye Link

Mr. and Mrs. Garner of Olivenhain are going to lose a chunk of their personal private property for a road widening.

Expanding roads and infrastructure is the "good" kind of eminent domain right?

But first we must think, why does this road need to be widened?

It is so the new residents of the sprawling insta-town of San Elijo Hills can better access Target and Barnes&Noble and Stater Bros. all part of the Ecke Ranch shopping center.

This is an example of backdoor loss of property to another private party. Technically the city is taking your land, but it is the for the benefit of another private party. This is exactly what happened to the people who lived on Leucadia Blvd. They lost their homes for the benefit of the same Ecke shopping center.

Remember at the city council meeting about Jerome Stocks' then proposed anti-eminent domain ordinance that a lady lawyer got up and spoke about the need for eminent domain in Olivenhain specifically? Coincidence?

Stinky West Nile Infested Lagoon Will Host 4 or More Hotels

Angela Lau Union Tribune Link

The Batiquitos Lagoon already host the famous La Costa Resort and Spa and the Four Seasons in the Aviara, soon it will have the big hotel development on the Carlsbad side (save Ponto) and Leucadia will have two hotel/condo developments on the Encinitas side.

That is a lot of high end money to be next to a stinky estuary with hordes of mosquitoes.

Morgan Mallory has a quote in the UT story, "They're going to improve that intersection architecturally, aesthetically," said Morgan Mallory, a board member for Leucadia 101 Mainstreet Association, a downtown improvement and historic preservation organization. "Growth is inevitable. Having attractive growth is good.

The existing hotels are pretty lame architecture wise, does anyone know what the new hotels are going to look like? We don't need anymore faux Spanish conquistador style stuff. Doesn't Morgan Mallory walk around town in a beret? Can we trust him when he says the hotels will be cool?

Will the new multi-million dollar Leucadia hotels be hip hotels with swanky lounges like the W Hotel or The Omni?

Or will they be lame and ugly like the crusty La Costa Resort and Spa?

If anyone from the KSL Corp. reads this please put in a cool jazz lounge or something. Leucadia needs a hip hang out. Gawd bless The Leucadian and The Boardroom but sometimes the wife and I want to dress up a bit and go hear some Coltrane or some avant garde turntablist instead of shooting pool with the local meth heads and listening to Van Halen on the juke.

Another Super Funny Letter from M. Pattinson

The best thing about reading the newspaper is looking for the latest wacky column from my now favorite super rockstar developer Michael D. Pattinson (president of home builder Barratt American and former president of the California Building Industry Association).

NCT link

His latest rant is a good one, a real knee slapper. He is all hot and bothered that developers are not allowed to dump dirt in rivers. Then he heard that there wasn't enough sand at the beach, so he figures that there is no sand at the beach because no dirt is washing out from the rivers onto said beach. The rivers are dirtless, thus the beach is sandless.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

This is a common belief, especially by yuppie golfers who only go to the beach on Labor Day.

River sand and dirt is not the same stuff we have on our beaches. A trip to the beach revels this simple if not totally obvious truth.

Our beach sand is pushed up from the deep blue sea by south swells in the spring, summer and fall. There is vast amounts of sand on the bottom offshore. Millions of years worth of the stuff.

The sand gets stripped off our beaches in the winter, usually during big storms with big waves. We lost almost all our beautiful sand after the El Nino winter of '83. It was after this time that most of the cliff trouble started.

Right now we have lovely sandy beaches. If you go down the stairs at Grandview beach at the north end of Leucadia and walk a few steps south you will see some sandstone rocks poking up. These seemingly small rocks are actually huge boulders that a few years ago loomed up a good 8-10 feet. They serve as a good eyeball measure of how much sand we have.

We still don't have as much as we had in the 70's when the beaches were HUGE. But we've come along way and the major dredging project from 5 years ago really helped (although we were experiencing a decent natural recovery at the time).


Even though it rained a ton this last winter the waves were not very big so we did not lose much sand. It was a woeful summer for surf but this fall is looking promising. We may end up with quite a bit of even more sand before the winter storms arrive.

As posted before, the newest multi-million dollar sand replenishment project is somewhat of a head scratcher because we do have a lot of sand now. But by 2008 things could change.

The rivers Pattinson wants to fill with dirt did wash out into the ocean this last winter. This is really good for the quality of the waves. The rivermouth "blows out" and forms a big sandbar and the waves peel along it. The bad part is that the water quality of the runoff is so bad that it is risky to surf these spots.



This north county rivermouth made the May '05 cover of Surfing magazine. I surfed this spot a lot this winter. It looks pretty but the pesticides runoff was so bad that it burned my eyes.

Fill dirt seems to be a real problem for Pattinson considering the drama on Sheridan.

Pattinson is reaching for another long stretch of logic on this river dirt/sand deal. Sorry buddy, nice try though. And thanks for laughs. If you are finding yourself with too much dirt why don't you build some kids some baseball fields or something?

Psychologists would call Pattinson's latest column "whiny little girl syndrome".

*I did a search on "pattinson" on the North County Times website and found his previous letters plus rebuttal letters from the public. It's a riot.
link

Our Cliffs Are Dry, So They Fall

SDUT link

Here is a Union Tribune story about dredging offshore sand and dumping it on the beach to help prevent the cliffs falling, a better solution than seawalls.

The offshore sand will be the good stuff, not the horrible river sand the city of Encinitas used to import in the 80's and it won't be dirt (see post below).

There is one thing I never hear anyone in charge talking about, the cliffs are no longer drippy.

What? Drippy you say?

When I was a kid the cliffs were wet, damp and dripping. Ever build a sandcastle at the beach? You use the damp wet sand to build it because it sticks and stays up. The dry sand crumbles. The physics of sandcastles.


Think also, concrete. What do we mix with concrete to make it strong? Water!

It is the same with our cliffs. When I kid the dripping bluffs were covered in blooming flowers and red ripe wild tomatoes. Yes, there were slides from time to time but the bluffs seemed much more solid then than now.

My guess is that the cliffs no longer drip because we have paved over so much of North County that the rain no longer soaks into the soil and gradually makes its way west via percolation and osmosis.

Now the rain rushes down the roads (through downtown Leucadia) and into the ocean. This run off may keep costing you an extra 5 bucks by the way (on top of the $110,000 we collectively put up as taxpayers. Our city looooves it's consultants!) link

Anyone that has lived here for more than 30 years can confirm that the area bluffs were drippy, not dry like today.

What can we do? Probably nothing at this point. It's only getting worse as the sprawling San Elijo Hill's continues to build out. So if you own a multi-million dollar home on Neptune Ave. shake your angry fist east towards your new neighbors.

Dredging offshore and dumping sand will help the cliffs but probably destroy the quality of the surf for a few weeks.

I humbly request that the city do the dredging in June when the weather and surf is horrible anyway. Please do not do it in the fall when the surf is good.