Last Update:  04/30/2012

WALK THIS WAY
Keith Curry introduced the idea of “Meet the Mayor”: announcing a date, time and place where people could come and chat with him about various issues. I pictured myself a civic Lucy with my sign, “The Mayor is In,” but that seemed a little static, and besides, suppose nobody came? So it’ll be “Walk with the Mayor” on Saturday, May 12, 9 am, leaving from the Oasis Senior Center. The walk will take about an hour. We will visit two city projects along Buck Gully as well as traipse Big Corona. Most of it is pretty easy, and where there are climbs, they are either spurs, meaning you can stay on top and wait for us to come back up, or at Big Corona you can walk along Ocean Boulevard and meet up with us at Jasmine. For those who don’t want to walk, we’ll be back at the Oasis around 10 am where we will have light refreshments. The good thing: If nobody comes, I’ll have a nice walk.

OCEAN FRIENDLY GARDENS
If you’re interested in having a garden that is both beautiful and efficient but lack ideas or know how, Surfrider Foundation and G3 have gotten together to make it easy. G3 puts on lectures and workshops that show how to improve water retention, soil condition, plant selection and the like to make a garden more ocean friendly. Surfrider has signs available that identify gardens as ocean friendly, maps that show where such gardens are, and also a tool kit to achieve such gardens available online. For more information, go to http://surfrider.org/ and click on Programs; and also
http://www.greengardensgroup.com/.

SIGNS (AS OPPOSED TO OMENS)
Now is the time that our public places are littered with campaign signs. The city has an ordinance against such signs in public rights of way, an ordinance that will be completely ignored in the next few months. Campaigns will place signs in every median they can find. It used to be that city staff would remove the signs to the General Services yard -- where campaigns would pick them up, and the process would start over. Now the signs are destroyed, but that will be barely a deterrent. The funny thing is the biggest expert I know, someone who is paid major dollars to run major state and national campaigns, says signs are worthless.
 

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email:  ngardner@newportbeachca.gov

FEE INCREASES
I will not be saying anything remarkable when I state that confronting controversy is something most of us like to avoid, and that includes city councils which means for years there were no (or extremely minor) increases in fees relating to use of the tidelands because everyone knew it would be contentious. The problem is that when there finally is the will to make changes, the changes are significant because of the previous inaction. This was true of the mooring fields where there was some definite sticker shock when the new fees were announced. This is also true of the next round which involves commercial marinas. A council committee spent the better part of a year researching the issue before coming up with a proposal. To nobody’s surprise, those affected have not exactly welcomed the proposed changes with open pocket books, but good dialogue has taken place, and there have been some revisions as a result. The basic changes suggested are to switch from annual permits to leases and to change the way rents are calculated with bigger marinas paying a percentage of gross of slip rentals for those slips over tidelands. The resulting increase in tideland revenues will still not cover tideland expenses. The difference is made up from the General Fund.

GOOD HANDS
When I was in high school, there were two basic requirements: get good grades and don’t get in trouble. Other than that, it was up to me how I entertained myself, so I spent many hours riding my horse and many more hours surfing. How times have changed. I went to a breakfast the other morning saluting the top academic achievers, senior class, at Harbor and CdM high schools. They all had dazzling grades and academic honors. In addition, all of them were involved in sports and, what’s really impressive, major volunteer activity. We’re not talking the occasional beach clean up here but significant hours every week with many of them devoting their summers to things like building orphanages in third-world countries. Sure, part of this is to bolster the college application, but it’s still impressive, and it’s hard to believe that kids who have worked so hard for others and been exposed to so many different experiences won’t be able to come up with some nifty solutions for the problems they will encounter—many of them thanks to my horseback riding, beach going non-volunteer generation.
 

WHAT DO YOU THINK? 

Please don’t hesitate to contact me with your ideas and opinions on these and other topics that should be addressed in future issues.