Friday, November 30, 2007

Hello Rain



34 comments:

  1. Hell of a drainage system Sheila Cameron approved while on the council!! Mr Bond is also part of this debacle, as well as Guerin and I believe Houlihan. I don't know if 'ol Jerry Stocks falls into the flood zone on this issue or not, on second thought what the hell, let's blame him also. He may not have been a council member then, but he is a council member now and he's just as guilty as Cameron for falling to do anything good for Leucadia.

    Flooding in Leucadia?? Really now J.P. this is not news and I can't understand why you would bother with posting this nonsense. Leucadia Roadside Park is just as the COE and staff want it to be... flooded.

    Didn't see the usual TV crews in the park today, they must be off filming the "burned" zones, sadly they fail to understand the real "burn" victim is Leucadia... burned by a council and staff that don't give a damn....never have, never will.

    Staggering up and down 101 trying to keep my laptop dry, anyone got a doorway I can sleep in tonight?? It's your RSPB!!!

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  2. RSBP,
    You must have been drunk back then.

    Jerome wasn't there at conception but he sure was there during the execution of the five million dollar drain system. He was willing to take credit for it before the first flood and then he was going to play the role of white knight and save the day. The question that should be asked of Jerome is, Did he operate a blunder cover up or was he orchestrating the charge to twist the public perception that the drainage failed and that the only way to fix it would be a REDEVELOPMENT DISTRICT?

    Unanswered questions
    Did the system fail? If it did, why wouldn't the council, including Jerome, tell the public why it failed?

    Worse, if the system didn't fail why was JEROME saying Leucadia NEEDED a redevelopment district so we could FIX the drainage system?

    We didn't get a redevelopment district, so is the drainage system a problem or not?

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  3. Ahhhhh. I finally let my siblings give you a good wash down. You really needed it. The bum piss, puke and terds; along with the hoards of cigarette butts were really starting to make Encinitas smell.

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  4. Dear RSPB,

    "Roadside" is one word, thus your posts should be signed "RPB". Other than that, keep up the good work. I can't imagine that any neighborhood in Del Mar, Solana Beach, or Carlsbad would have been left to flood, over and over, year after year. I love Encinitas, and I think the people who actually work at City Hall are the best. But the elected element of governance has indeed allowed my neighborhood to languish is pools of neglect as well as rainwater. At least we now have some new sidewalks from which to view the 101 Ponds. Too bad they subside - we could stock them with fish. All the best, Ben

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  5. Ben Here Long or Ben Hear Long?

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  6. I think roadside park is haunted by the century old trees they cut down, and then the other fiasco, cutting down another cypress, the wrong one, and then another?

    Just looks like a big puddle, now, because that's what it is.

    We really needed the rain. And this happens, the flooding, every time there is rain. The "fix" made the flooding worse along North Highway 101.

    Streets are drying out, today.

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  7. Gary says the storm drain might have worked if they had not run extra runoff into it which literally blew it up. Gary likes the idea of a number of smaller out take pipes from three or four stragetic locations. His peoples guesstimate on cost was considerably less than a redevlopment district.

    until something is developed every time there is more than a 1/2" of rain in a short period there is going to be a sandbags, pumps and raft situations. one to two inches is of course worse. if the water can't get to the sea it's going to collect in the low areas, isn't it?

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  8. The lot north of Karina's is nasty - full of trash on a normal day, and now that it rained, it is really ugly.

    Who owns this lot?

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  9. FYI RSPB, Sheila Cameron championed the funding for the new storm drain in Leucadia. Many citizens stood behind her in that effort and council rightfully approved it when the issue finally came before them. The last thing Sheila wanted was for it to not work properly.
    Council members AND the public of course should be able to rely on commissioners and hired engineers to be honest and competent. The 5 million-dollar storm drain that was installed has only 24" diameter pipes. The engineer claimed "the Coastal Commission would only allow us a 24" diameter" but the Coastal Commission said "We never said that". As a result, no one has since dared to make either party responsible for the blunder in order to fix the fix.
    Instead, another engineer was hired to explore other alternatives. Least of my favorites but high on others’ lists was the destruction of all the Hwy 101 trees for the installation of a $40 million dollar pipe. (!) To be fair, that engineer actually did improve several parts of the flooding areas along the hwy with better flow devices, but in my opinion it could be part of someone's larger plan to blight and redevelop Leucadia endorsing his big fix scenario. Especially when I discovered San Diego only pays $1 million dollars per mile for storm drain installation and we were being told it would cost us $25 million per mile. Thankfully, our city no longer is toying with the idea of using that engineer's colossal suggestions.

    If we double the diameter of the 24” pipe that was laid, we get four times the capacity or volume of water possible. Problem solved. If we use the company that does it for $1 million a mile, we save a bundle. (costly feeder lines to the main are already in place.) But shunning my idea, one of the Encinitas staff members told me “NCTD would never allow us to dig up their dirt again!” I wonder what made him think that? Someone else’s agenda to get the big bucks with the formation of a redevelopment district? Perhaps.

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  10. Jerome Stocks is an agent of blight.

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  11. Why didn't someone at the city get fired over this 5 million dollar blunder?

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  12. It is time for the city to hold a TOWN HALL meeting to explain what happened, so the mistake is not repeated.

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  13. The Coastal Commission is partly right in that they didn't limit the size of the drainage pipe, what they did limit was the size / location / capacity of the settlement basin at the end of the line. You just can't dump stormwater into the lagoon or ocean. The water has to be "treated." This is what Gary and others don't seem to get. It's not the capacity of the pipe.

    My guess is that the huge cost touted is not for the pipe alone, but involves the
    eventual "treatment" of huge amounts of stormwater, whether it includes basins or some mechanical treatment like Moonlight Beach.

    I've heard proposals that include pipes through the bluff face. Seems reasonable at first, but once again, we're only moving stormwater directly into the ocean.

    The ultimate solution will include a very expensive vault or siltation basin at the end of the line before it enters the lagoon or the ocean. The big question has always been, where? In the Lagoon? Rail corridor? You got the idea.

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  14. The coastal commission did say they would rather have seen the city put in the microtunnels to the beach. There was a way to do it and it would have been cheaper than $40 million.

    There was also a way to put in the bigger pipe. Jerome said there was and he said the coastal commission would not be adverse to his "vision" for the new & improved storm drain.

    Jerome Stocks said the coastal commission would allow us to build a system with a bigger pipe. If they wouldn't why did Jerome approve paying Rick Engineering hundreds of thousands of dollars to draft out the project. Implementing Rick's design would cost us $40 million dollars according to Stocks and that was the justification for the redevelopment district. That is why Peder Norby said that not doing the redevelopment district would be "irresponsible".

    If Leftcoast is right then Jerome Stocks was irresponsible. Jerome either lied about the proposed system's acceptability to the coastal commission or his vision neglected important points about the sedimentation basin.

    Jerome, Danny, Houlihan, and Bond need to come clean. Until they do we shouldn't trust any of them to watch out for us.

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  15. http://www.house.gov/list/press/ca50_bilbray/03302007.html

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  16. All storm water runoff gets to the ocean, and most of it is unfiltered. The highly touted filter at Cottonwood Creek is not designed for peak flow like on Saturday, and the tiny retention basin is completely insufficient to hold the water back so there is time to filter it. A competently engineered filter system was sacrified for tennis courts, basketball courts, parking, and the park itself. The park could have been designed correctly, but would have been unusable in the rainy season with downpours. It would look like Leucadia Roadside Park.

    I was at Moonlight Beach on Friday morning. The water was pouring down the creek bed, and this was before the heaviest rain had arrived. I'm sure the filter was overwhelmed. How much pollution ran into the ocean?

    There is room on the Hall property for the city to design a large enough retention basin to properly filter the water going down Rossini Creek into San Elijo Lagoon. but it looks like Jerome Stocks and his buddies have other plans.

    There is a solution to the flooding problem in Leucadia. But first we have to be sure Jerome Stocks and Rick Engineering are not part of it. Gary seems to have some good ideas. We should start there.

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  17. Any solution better not even mention dumping the polluted storm water to Beacons Beach. If any new pipe drains to beacons your adding vile polluted water to a currently unpolluted beach. And City sewer spills are most likely to happen when we have heavy rains because much runoff ends up entering the sewer through manhole lids. If you have a storm drain dumping to Beacons beach, you will begin seeing beach closed signs like we have a Moonlight. Plus there would be major lawsuits filed by many environmental groups and for good reason.

    The stormwater should drain to Batiquitos lagoon which acts as a natural filter before draining to the beach which is where it has drained for tens of thousands of years.

    Anyone that mentions a new stormdrain draining to Beacons beach should be run out of town or make them french kiss the Roadside Park Bum for 5 minutes. Then they would know what the surfers feel like when they are surfing in waters polluted by fowl storm water and sewage.

    There is no good reason to make another pollution source for our beaches.

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  18. actually there is already an "illegal" drain that goes to beacons. it appears that the city plans to leave it in if beacons gets its facelift. i believe it is where the leucadia park "lake"
    is drained when the pumps roll in, although i do not know that for a fact.

    moonlight has decreased it's "polluted" days from the twenties to i think 5 last year.

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  19. BOB,
    And you would be an agent of....S.P.E.C.T.O.R!!!!I've always know that you are hell bent on total world domination!!!

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  20. The City could easily get sued over that beacon's illegal pipe.
    They are treading on tin ice. The pipe does not have an envirnmental permit.

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  21. no it does not, but necessity is the mother of circumvention sometimes.

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  22. The outfall of the storm drain at the north end of Leucadia neither goes into the ocean nor the Batiquitos Lagoon, but to 2 verdant basins in between, which has never and will never overflow into the lagoon or ocean. From there the water is daylighted, percolates, feeds plants and of course evaporates. Whether our puddles get there in 1 hour or 10 hours makes no difference, it all goes to the same place.

    When the city was told about occasional cisterns as relief for some puddles in our area I thought (and still think) it was a great idea. Rick Engineering however said that a cistern would have to be 8' x 80' x 8,000' in order to handle all the runoff of a 100 year storm. I'm not an engineer, but I strongly disagree with that enormous alleged volume of water. 100 Olympic swimming pools worth of water is not our problem here. 15 years ago, newspapers were reporting 100 year storms in our area within weeks of each other. I remember thinking hmmm. They'd better rename them then.

    Re: drainage through the bluffs. The last time this issue was visited by the city around 1998 (at a special $26,000 meeting) with the public, experts and officials, nearly 60 Neptune folk showed up to voice their displeasure. Some said they would sue. Many did not want the bluffs disturbed with micro-tunneling under or near their property. And most surfers of course did not want runoff directly into the ocean. I'm open to new ideas, but not repeating the past (like we did wasting tax dollars with revisiting the notion of redevelopment 2 years back).

    I believe a new treatment center for the runoff of Cottonwood creek is in place and I'm glad we live in a city that takes it's runoff seriously. Upstream, the Cottonwood Creek park itself is a monument to a cleaner ocean. That portion of the creek hadn't seen daylight in decades. I'm glad we don't have to deal with the untreated runoff that La Jolla must have with it's steep mountains by the sea.

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  23. Fred for Mayor!

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  24. I'd rather eat a bug.

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  25. That's nothing -

    I am one of the unfortunate Leucadia residents who lives on an unpaved public street (yes, they exist). You practically need a 4x4 to navigate the last 200 yards of the northern end of Caudor St. after a rain.

    City announced 2 years ago that it had budgeted $6 million to pave dirt streets in the city. BS - absolutely nothing done since. PS - Sheila lives a few houses away from me, on the paved part of the street.

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  26. "I'm glad we live in a city that takes it's runoff seriously."

    Fred, our City leaders didn't choose to make this very expensive treatment facility out of their concern for the environment, but concern for the lost dollars in the form of penalties paid to the state for non compliance.

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  27. Fred, you have good ideas, you can have your bugs and the next open position on council.

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  28. pkeithkelly- I have been complaining about unpaved streets and alley ways for years now but no one listens to a bum!!! Your 6 million went for the library. Remember it started as a $8 million library then the council got library envy ( that's like penis envy only costs YOU the TAXPAYER money)so they decided to short change the needed infrastructure for books!!! Ha, what folly!!

    Keep your sandbags handy and gather your water in buckets and leave it at Sheila's house.

    RSPB

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  29. I don't know, but I like Leucadia flooding. I mean, I don't like it when it floods houses (as our garage did until we fixed the angle of our driveway....one time it went in the house), but big puddles and flooding are a part of Leucadia. I mean, what would Vulcan be without being a lake?

    I love Leucadia flooding! It adds character!

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  30. I'm glad a few of you are now seeing the link between non action in Leucadia and the proposed Redevelopment District scam that was championed by Kerry Miller, Peter Norby, Dan Dalager, Jerome Stocks, Morgan Mallory, Charly Marvin and a few other people who were saliavting to get on the RDA committee and get a new job to the tune of 100k a year. Miller may be gone, but he's in Folsom starting an RDA there and some people are still salivating. Don't ever forget this people. Remembeer this when you go to the polls in November 2008. By the way, stop blaming Shelia for everything. She never made money off the city unlike Chuck DiVivier who was responsible for that hedious neighborhood that borders the San Elijo lagoon on Manchester and his bitchy wife who, along with the rest of the San Dieguito Heritage Museum jerks tried to do a land grab and take what we know know as Cottonwood Creek, for their personal playground. The reason we have a dog park on Orpheus is because the council at that time, Gail Hano, John Davis, James Bond, etc, were given free trips to Hawaii by certain people in the adjacent neighborhood. Shelia never took a bribe like that. She was high strung and a pain in the ass, but her intentions were always pure.

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  31. Yes, I like/liked Sheila, too. It doesn't do any good to try to scapegoat her, and put the blame on her for someone else's "spin" of past actions.

    We are dealing with the Council Members we have now, not back then, although of course there is overlap. Peder Norby might be a nice guy, but I question his position as 101 Czar, if he was in favor of an RDA (redevelpment agency) district in Leucadia.

    Gil, I think there was less Moonlight Beach closures partly because we have had so little rain, thus less polluted run-off, the past couple of years.

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  32. Only last year we had more rain than in 125 years. But it has been pretty dry since.

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  33. What is the difference between "scapegoating" Sheila, and "scapegoating" Jerome?

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  34. One is not a scapegoat. One earned their reputation.

    One is bought and paid for by developers and city employee unions. They sell out their constituents for the benefit of their contributing developers and employee unions who donate to their campaign fund and quest for higher office. Meanwhile, the city ends up with no capital for needed improvements- Only trophy parks and fire stations which don’t benefit the average citizen- Jus the chosen few.

    I'll give you a hint who I am talking about, it’s not Sheila.

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