Let's Tour North Leucadia (part 12)

Our second of several empty lots (Empty lot #1--Leucadia!: Let's Tour North Leucadia (part 4) Why are there so many fenced off empty lots in Leucadia when coastal property is so highly desired? Well, I know from experience trying to get my wealthy friends to invest in Leucadia that they have two concerns: A. What is the deal with the flooding? B. What is the deal with redevelopment? The threat of eminent domain spooked off several friends of mine who wanted to invest in coastal Leucadia. Way to go RDA pundits!

If I could buy this lot I would put in a prefab live/work building kind of like this,




Here is a funky little place, the Rancho Leonero Fishing Resort booking office. *UPDATE-This building is curently empty and available for lease.


Now we are at the infamous Bar Leucadian which locals still call The Leucadian or "The Luke". (and I liked the old yellow sign better).

When I turned 21 The Leucadian was still in true dive bar form and my friends and I went there the first time on a dare. We were not welcome as the place was filled with sketchy crack head dry wall workers and fumed out house painters playing pool and smoking millions of cigarettes. However, during the 90's an increased population of twenty-something year olds were living in Encinitas and dive bars became the trendy thing to do. Young pretty girls started going to The Leucadian and they even started a Thursday night Ladies Night. The Leucadian also became the only place in Encinitas to see local rock bands play like Lo-Fi Nipple and The Stereotypes. Once a year they even have Leudrock, where local bands play all day and all night ( Leudrock 2 shines its light on underground)
Here is the myspace page for the booking manager if you want your band to play there, click me.
So, go to the Leucadian and play some darts and have a round with your friends and be sure to toast funky Leucadia. Every town has their bar, and this is ours.


For all the laid back grooviness there is in Leucadia there will always be those guys with their big jacked up trucks.

Weekends on coast highway Leucadia mean hoards of lycra clad 10 speeders who take up the entire lane and run stop signs. This is one of the smaller groups.

Leucadia!: Let's Tour North Leucadia (part 11)

Artsy Fartsy Time

Speaking of how hip we are, here are a couple of cool art shows coming up:

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Fashionista Creeps Discover Cardiff

Dude, Cardiff is totally blowing up brah.

click images for large view



Riviera magazine is a wannabee upscale publication that comes off as trashy and vapid. Check it out.

You stay classy San Diego, North County Standout: New magazine shows off San Diego style

Let's Tour North Leucadia (part 11)

click images for large view

Looking back north from Leucadia Donuts. It's tricky making a left turn from here because there are always cars and big trucks parked in front blocking the view. This section of Leucadia has interesting drought resistant plants in the medians. In this photo you can see weeds sprouting in the medians, the city has since cleaned out these weeds and the medians look nice.
I like that pair of cypress trees on Vulcan Ave in the background.



One of the interesting things about Leucadia is the mix of buildings on the coast highway. You have apartments and condos and houses and small businesses of all kinds and it's eclectic and cool. So, it's a disappointment to find these houses in such a state of disrepair. In the top photo it just looks like a cool old weathered beach house, but unfortunately the second photo shows just how crummy it looks in person. One of the houses even has the windows boarded up but from the number of cars it looks like people are still living there. This place is looking worse and worse every year. It's too bad because this place has a lot of potential. I didn't get a photo of it but the residential property directly behind this dilapidated duplex was recently spruced up and looks nice. I hope these houses get cleaned up soon because when landlords let this happen it only adds fuel to the pro-redevelopment crowd. I do like the 2nd roof line and the tree out front is pretty cool. The spilling gravel is not cool.

Status-blighted or just in the need of some serious TLC?


Looking south down the iconic California coast highway. The trees of the Leucadia coastal corridor are something to be proud of I think. This section of Leucadia is unique to southern California. You won't find this kind of ambiance until you get north of Point Conception.
Sidewalks would be groovy here and that pedestrian looks awfully lonely on the east side of the highway. Vehicles with surfboards passing by are a constant reminder of how important surfing is to our local culture and economy.

Leucadia!: Let's Tour North Leucadia (part 10)

Let's Tour North Leucadia (part 10)

Continuing our coast highway tour of north Leucadia we arrive at The Sands trailer park.

My parents have informed me that The Sands was the first place I lived when I was a baby back in 1970. We lived there for a year before my mom and dad bought a house in Leucadia in the neighborhood known as Tortilla Flats.

My mom says The Sands used to have big beautiful full grown trees but the then wacky owner cut them all down, what a shame. My dad says the owner wouldn't let anyone have a phone inside their trailer and had to use the payphone outside because he made money off it.
The Sands is a source of drama right now. The new owner has been raising the rents drastically in an attempt to drive the residents out. Now the residents are in a Catch-22, they can't afford to live there anymore but they can't sell their units because who would buy into a park with a hostile owner? The Sands residents have asked the city council for help. We'll see what happens...

The iconic Leucadia Donuts! I try not to eat donuts very often but it's worth going in here just to talk to two of the nicest people on earth, Tom and his wife. Some say that Leucadia Donuts is the heart and soul of Leucadia and I believe them. If you want to chat with your fellow Leucadians about any topic this is the place to do it.
Oddly, this building is actually on the same property as The Sands trailer park and is owned by the same guy. We should make Leucadia Donuts a historical landmark in order to preserve it forever. Can you imagine a Krispy Kreme here with their crappy corporate style,
overly sugary pseudo-donuts and dead-eyed depressed employees behind the counter instead of Tom? Shudder to think.

Leucadia!: Let's Tour North Leucadia (part 9)

Single? Single? Single? Are you Single?

Here is just one of fifty thousand Single? signs that have cropped up around town.

Here is the official site, please use protection: http://leucadiasingles.com/

Orange Sandbags? Gee, thanks.

Sandbags were placed around the Leucadia Blvd intersection recently to help control erosion. I don't know if it was the city of Encinitas of NCTD that placed the sandbags there. I'm not against the sandbags, but do they really need to be orange?


I've never even seen orange sandbags before, have you? What the hell man?

I swear it's a conspiracy sometimes. I mean, orange sandbags? Talk about your proverbial sore thumbs.

Yes, the sandbags are orange. You noticed too? Good thing the sandbags are orange or else I would have swerved and run over them.


Let's see, orange sandbags? Check. Dirt and weeds? Check. Okay people, nothing to see here, move along.

When people complain that Leucadia is ugly what they really mean is that the NCTD rail corridor is not managed well. The NCTD is like it's own government and they don't seem to care if their railway uglies up your downtown. The dirt, weeds, dust and grim and puddles all belong to the NCTD. Downtown Encinitas has a bit of a chip on it's shoulder over Leucadia, but it's pure luck that the tracks curve in just enough so that Encinitas is able to have a two sided mainstreet downtown. Imagine if the tracks ran all the way down the coast highway like in Leucadia.

Encinitas city councilman Jerome Stocks is on the NCTD board (Planning Commitee Chairperson and Member of Governance Committee) Maybe if we ask nicely our good pal Jerome will have the orange sandbags replaced with normal sandbags so we don't look like a bunch of hicks.

*note--the city went through the center medians in north Leucadia last week and pulled all the weeds that grew from the recent rains. That was nice, but it's kind of one step forward and two steps back when you have orange freakin' sandbags.

The Surveys Usefulness is Dubious

The following is a comment posted in reaction to this blog topic about the forthcoming $10,000 city survey:
Leucadia!: $10,000 Warm and Fuzzy Waste of Funds

JP's suggested survey design is what is called a convenience sample. If you are looking to get very accurate estimates of what the whole population thinks, a convenience sample can be problematic and misleading. This is especially likely if your convenience sample picks up people who are a poor representation of the whole population. Setting up a booth in Leucadia is likely to produce different results than if you sampled in new Encinitas. People in Leucadia are keenly aware of how behind the City is in providing adequate infrastructure.

Another poster who snipped at [Mary] Fleener alludes to the gold standard in sample surveys. This is the simple random sample. If you sample randomly, your estimates will be unbiased and your margin of errors will be meaningful (if you calculate them correctly).

If the City's population of interest is all adults in the City, the City's survey does NOT meet the criteria to be described as a simple random sample. In a simple random sample all adults would have the same chance of being sampled. The City's survey has MANY nuances that move it away from being a simple random sample. This only matters if the bias is large enough to matter.

For the most part, it doesn't matter much to me if the estimates from the survey are mildly or moderately biased. Why? Even if we did a census of the entire population and I had the true values (not estimates that you get from a sample survey) I don't see much utility from having this information. Even if they were valuable, we need a council who are going to act on what they find.

When voting 4-0 to spend the $10k on this survey there was no discussion on how the council adjusted or acted on the previous results. The survey's usefulness is dubious and its lack of use clear.

Here are some of the questions included in the survey:

1. Is Encinitas a good place to live? My view: regardless of the "sentiment" shouldn't we be constantly struggling to make it an even better place to be?

2. Are you satisfied with fire protection services? Fortunately, only a small percentage of people have needed to call upon the fire department and even that small sub population has little means to base an evaluation of the service. Just because lots of people say they are satisfied with the fire department doesn't mean they should be satisfied.

3. Are you satisfied with trash services? Well, trash collection is pretty straight forward and something everyone has some experience with . In the last survey only 71% said they were very satisfied. The council thinks we have very good service and I don't think they are going to revisit the trash contract. Think about this too, something is way wrong with trash service long before a large proportion of the population have complaints. The city is better off spending resources letting citizens know how to inform the city of grievances, making a record of those grievances (and remediation) are archived, and ensuring nothing is structurally wrong with the service. The way I see it is that things may need to be changed even if only a small proportion of the population are affected/aware of a problem.

4. Is the City going in the right direction? Should peoples' responses be weighted the same regardless of whether or not they have been following the city activities closely or even read the paper? Most people can't name a single council person.

5. If there were one thing the City of Encinitas could do to improve your quality of life, what would that be? There were some interesting responses. Each of the following were responses from a single respondent: 1) "Keep Leucadia Funky" 2) Make city a car-free zone, 3) Get a library. Only one out of 300 said library! The library was one of the city's biggest expenditures last year (taking us deeper in debt). I would conclude that the results of this survey item are not guiding the council actions.

Stop paying to have it asked?

The top two responses to this question: 1) Stop/control growth / development & reducing / managing traffic / congestion. These two got 59% of all the responses.

Let's not waste any more money on surveys that are not useful and/or used.

Kevin C is president of the Encinitas Taxpayers Association and is a senior statistician at the School of Medicine at UCSD. He is also a pretty good surfer and his wife is the nicest person in the history of human beings.

Strawberries, Bizness, Home Expo and Art

Here is a press release for you to read,

Farmers Market News:

Strawberry season is here and they are at the Farmers Market...and they are gorgeous. So get them while they last.



Business Fair: The last Sunday of every month will be a business fair at the Farmers Market where local businesses will be offered a booth to promote their businesses. Normally, besides produce and flowers, only artists, crafters, health and beauty products, and specialty foods have booths. The first one will be this month, March 25th.



Spring Home Improvement and Design Expo, April 1st...no kidding! If your business pertains to the home, this is a great way to promote your business in the community. Attached is the application. If interested in either or both of the above events, please contact market manager Ron LaChance at 858-272-7054 or email ronlachance@gsws.com.



Remember, a percentage of the proceeds from the market go to Paul Ecke Central School PTA and also to help support Leucadia 101 Main Street operations.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Calling all Artists.

The Third Annual LeucadiART Walk will be held August 26, 10 - 5 pm. If you are interested in participating, please contact the Leucadia 101 office for an application, or download it from www.leucadia101.com

Blue Light Special

From the 10news website Guru Or Accused Scam Artist?

His name is Tilak and his followers said to call him a guru, mystic or teacher is to limit what he is.

Tilak has been gaining a following in north San Diego County, operating out of a home in Encinitas.

To his devoted followers, Tilak is a superior being.

To his detractors, he’s a charlatan that preys on the vulnerable.

"I think if it was 150 years ago, this would be the guy who would come to your town and try to sell you snake oil as a miracle cure," said attorney Jim Bush.

What Tilak offers is enlightenment through his “gift of light” -- energy of light, often blue, he said in his literature that he could personally transmit.

"You lie down on a bed, face up, close your eyes, and he does his treatment," said Maureen Rafael.

Rafael, a book editor, was a customer for one treatment and said she saw a blue light.

Eileen Tipton said she also saw a blue light when she went to Tilak last year.

"There were these bedrooms set up for him to have, touch and blow on you, where you would see the lights," said Tipton.

Tipton paid for three private sessions and then charged $3,300 to her credit card for a weekend retreat in Las Vegas.

“He will invite you; you have to be personally invited," said Tipton.

On that retreat, Tipton said she had doubts, especially when Tilak disappeared after leading his followers to the Las Vegas Strip.

"I heard later he was at the gambling tables with my friend," Tipton told 10News.

Tipton said what turned the tables completely was how Tilak treated her then 15-year-old daughter, Tessa.

“He offered to take her under his wing, to be a spiritual guide to her for the next three years," said Tipton.

Tessa said Tilak invited her to Las Vegas, where she stayed with him and he promised they would party and drink. She does not claim he ever made sexual advances toward her.

"Everybody treated him like he was a god," said Tessa.

One former follower told 10News, “Simple things like getting up and getting food, he wouldn't do on his own. He would have other people do it for him. He just seemed very catered to; he loved the lifestyle."

Six former followers spoke to 10News and echoed the same sentiments.

One former associate told 10News Tilak was “a lusty little guy who gets the money and the chicks.”

Another said, “He’s totally a scam artist. He preys on people’s weakness.”

Tilak lives in a home in Las Vegas and has one bankruptcy. His followers said he has given homes, money and cars as gifts.

10News learned Tilak is no stranger to controversy. In a 1993 New York Magazine article, former students said Tilak claimed sex with him was the path to enlightenment and that he would threaten people with cancer if they left.

Tilak has denied all of the accusations.

Through Tilak’s attorney, Michael Eisner, 10News investigators tried to obtain a response to a series of questions. While he would not answer specific questions, he said, “They are all lies.”

Rafael said she believes Tilak is a liar and discovered the secret of his blue lights right after her session.

"As I got up from the bed, looked down on the floor, there was a little plastic light, about this big," said Rafael.

Tipton wants her $4,100 back, but she is speaking out for another reason.

"That other people won't buy into something that's not true," said Tipton.

While Tilak declined a 10News request for an interview made more than two weeks ago, Eisner provided the following statement: “Tilak Fernando denies all the allegations of improper (and wrongful) conduct.”



Duuuude, I am totally cosmic. Giiiive meeee your credit card nuuuumber, ooooooOOOOooo!

Read more about Tilak and other creeps at Guruphiliac.

Tilak's website.

$10,000 Warm and Fuzzy Waste of Funds

Encinitas approves $10K for survey

Last night Encinitas council members Jerome Stocks, Maggie Houlihan, Dan Dalager and mayor Jim Bond voted to spend $10,000 to try and see if 300 random stay-at-home moms, isolated senior citizens and shut-in hermits like living Encinitas. Teresa Barth did not vote because she is out of town, I really hope she would have voted NO on this.

From the NCT article:

By: ADAM KAYE - Staff Writer

ENCINITAS ---- The Encinitas City Council on Wednesday authorized spending $10,200 to survey residents on their satisfaction with City Hall.

The vote was 4-0. Councilwoman Teresa Barth was absent on a long-planned trip.

"This will give us an annual report card," said Councilman Jerome Stocks. "How are we doing? How are we serving you? I think that's really valuable information."

Before any of the 300 telephone surveys are conducted, however, a subcommittee of Barth and Stocks will collaborate with staffers and an Oregon-based consultant to develop 30 questions.

Some points,

*30 questions is an insane amount of questions to ask over the phone, especially when cold calling someone. The reality is that whomever answers their home phone (I assume the pollers will call increasingly unpopular landlines, not cell phones) and if someone is actually home and agrees to answer questions; he or she is going to get very tired by question 10 and will most likely hang up. Then the poller will probably just fudge the other 20 questions instead of starting over with a new person (I have friends who did this sort of work in college and admitted to filling out the blanks themselves just to get the job done).

*If the city had any web savvy they could post a 30 question poll on their website. The newspapers then report that the city is putting this poll on the web (free marketing). Then people can log on and do a quick registration so that they can only take the poll once. Since this stupid little blog gets over 500 unique hits a day and the Encinitas chamber of commerce reported their site got over 250,000 hits in six weeks I think finding 300 people to take an online poll wouldn't be a problem.

*The city council members and staff could go around town in on a Saturday morning with a clipboard and ask people in the flesh questions about Encinitas.

*I can tell you right now that the results of the poll will be overwhelmingly positive because Encinitas is the greatest small town on Earth. But the fact that living here by the beach in America is super awesome doesn't really reflect the performance of the council, staff and city services.

See previous post about the last survey: Leucadia!: Small Town Yokels Ripped Off for $10,000

The Fight for Net Neutrality is The Fight for Free Speech

The Internet is the ultimate tool of the free speech that our founding fathers fought and died for. If value your right to whine about Encinitas politics (among other things) then watch this quick video and then visit Save the Internet Dot Com.

Let's Tour North Leucadia (part 9)

click images for large view


On the corner of the south side of Grandview St is this funny little building that has had two different vehicles crash into it on two separate occasions.

I posted on Part 8 of the tour that we might want to think about putting a stop sign here. Left turns can be kind of hairy dealing with 4 lanes of obscured traffic.

I saw quite a few people get on and off the bus this day. Here we are in front of the Elite hair salon, previous home of The Buzz. I got my cut at The Buzz a few times by Richard and his chihuahuas. I haven't been into this new place yet, I've been making my wife cut my hair the last few years.

Sweet Airstream trailer!

The smallest used car lot on earth?

Leucadia!: Let's Tour North Leucadia (part 8)

If only it were a little bigger

Last month the NCT ran this strange story in their science and technology section. I thought I had accidentally clicked on The Onion.

Losing Ground: North County's shoreline victim of natural process

By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer

NORTH COUNTY ---- If only Santa Catalina Island were bigger. The popular tourist destination off the shore of Orange County is 22 miles long and 8 miles across at its widest point. Even at its smallish size, its rocky bulk shelters beaches from Oceanside to Los Angeles from giant winter waves and helps them retain sand, according to a new study by scientists at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Similarly, other Channel Islands get credit for the relatively wide and sandy beaches around Ventura and Santa Barbara.

Farther south, much of North County lies outside of Santa Catalina's shadow. Its beaches bear the brunt of brutal winter swells. Consequently, local beaches tend not to be as sandy as those elsewhere in Southern California, said Bill O'Reilly, a senior development engineer at Scripps who spearheaded the study, in an interview last week.

O'Reilly recently presented study findings to the San Diego Association of Governments' shoreline preservation committee, which is contemplating another sand replenishment project like the one in 2001 that beefed up a dozen scrawny beaches from North County to Imperial Beach. The committee has decided to shop around for state and federal grants to defray the estimated $25 million cost of dredging sand from the ocean floor and spreading it on six miles of beaches.

After the presentation, Steve Aceti, executive director of the Encinitas-based California Coastal Coalition and a committee member, joked that the panel's priorities might be misplaced.

"All these years, we've been talking about trying to get a grant for more sand," Aceti quipped. "We ought to be talking about getting a grant to make Catalina Island bigger."

Ha-Ha, that' great. We've now established that Steve Aceti is not a surfer because no surfer would choose to reduce our swell window even more. (Aceti is not a scientist either, he is a political lobbyist, so why is he quoted in the science section of the paper?)

The article spends a lot of time blaming Catalina and lagoons for our lack of sand and passes over man made structures like harbors and jetties.

If we are going to blame Catalina we might as well start blaming the moon. The moon affects tides and high tides can strip and move the sand around overnight. Aceti might as well quip that we need a smaller moon. Then Michael D Pattinson can write an op-ed piece about crazy moon lovers and their crazy moon loving agenda against sand.

It's funny, northern and central California have wide open swell windows, get 50 foot waves and lots of rain and storms. Yet, there are many beautiful sandy beaches in central and northern California. They also have massive kelp forest that dwarf anything we've had for decades. These giant kelp forest protect the beaches and coast by grooming the massive swells.

Maybe it's time north county politicos starts giving a damn about our local kelp beds, that's something we can actually make "a little bigger".

This image ran with the NCT story. It shows a swell model and the "shadows" the islands cast. This image doesn't tell the whole story because the angle and size of the swell is constantly changing. This image is of a rare big west swell.


To see this swell model in real time click here. Be sure to check out the other regions of California.