One-Sided Report

I live as close to the river as one should, and if and when the 100-year flood hits, it will most likely take my home with it (“There Is No San Diego River,” Cover Story, October 23). I live in Mission Valley Village, and our mobile home park was bought by a developer, Archstone Smith, which wants the City to close our park and let them build a four-story condo complex within ten feet of the river, across from the Admiral Baker Golf Course. The City’s Development Services Department did an environmental impact report on the project, and there was no input in this report from anyone from any of the river conservatory groups. At first I thought that it did not bother anyone, and it might be supported by them. However, after seeing how the EIR misrepresented other things, I no longer believe that. What I am trying to find out is if there are organizations that are interested in preserving this section as is and would like to have the easement through here for the river walk and trail. We, the residents, are going before the city council in the near future to try to stop this development and save our homes and the easement.

Homer Barrs
President
Mission Valley Village Mobile Home Park

River Revival

Nice article on the San Diego River (“There Is No San Diego River,” Cover Story, October 23).

I was really surprised to see Mr. Cuthbert quoted as saying, “There was a little activity in the Lakeside area. People there borrowed my reports and exerted a little bit of pressure. They have done some work in developing park space,” because that is not the case, and a lot of work is going on out here, about $17 million-plus in river restoration!

I work for Lakeside’s River Park Conservancy and would like to invite you and Mr. Cuthbert out for a tour of our project and show you that we are saving the San Diego River out here in Lakeside!

Lakeside’s River Park Conservancy was founded in 2001, with the mission to preserve and restore the biological integrity and beauty of the San Diego River while integrating recreational uses.

The segment of the San Diego River in Lakeside had long been the focus of extensive sand-mining operations and heavy industry. Such industrial operations are coming to an end, and a new phase in the river’s life is at hand, one in which nature and humanity work in harmony and regional quality of life is enhanced.

Phase one restoration of the San Diego River in Lakeside was completed January 2007, which included removal of a constriction in the river to allow for the safe passage of floodwaters.

Phase one also replaced acres of riparian habitat for wildlife and supports a multiuse trail system for runners, walkers, hikers, and equestrians.

Many threatened and endangered species reside at Lakeside’s River Park, such the California gnatcatcher and the least Bell’s vireo.

Lakeside’s river restoration also created four acres of constructed wetlands designed to use phytoremediation (sun and plants) as a natural filtration system to treat storm water and urban runoff flows (pollution) entering the site at the mouth of Los Coches Creek (a large, 17-square-mile tributary) as it enters into the San Diego River on its way to the Pacific Ocean.

Currently we are in phase two of the restoration process, which began in January of 2008 with Caltrans taking approximately 500,000 cubic yards of fill dirt from the south side (next to Highway 67), saving taxpayers about $6 million. This dirt will be used as fill in the construction of the Highway 52 extension.

The removal of the dirt is good for the River Park because it will lower the ground level to allow for the natural river bottom to reemerge.

Once the excavation of the fill dirt is completed, Lakeside’s River Park Conservancy will revegetate this area with native California plants and create a new wetlands habitat. This new wetland will be home to many animals and birds and also provide additional water-storage areas during floods.

Cindy Collins
Membership & Volunteer Manager
Lakeside’s River Park Conservancy

Elementary Motivation

Your September 11 cover story in the Reader, entitled “Plague of the Urban Tumbleweeds,” moved our school into action. Each year, Fletcher Hills Elementary School’s fifth-grade class holds a fund-raiser to raise money for the end-of-year activities. This year’s fund-raiser is Project Green, a green fund-raiser selling environmentally friendly, reusable shopping bags with our school’s logo printed on them!

Our goal as a school is to sell 1000 reusable shopping bags. If every family at Fletcher Hills Elementary purchases and uses at least one green bag, our school will have reduced plastic-bag use by 180,000 bags per year.

Our fund-raiser kickoff was held on October 25 at Fletcher Hills Elementary School’s annual Fall Festival, and the fund-raiser will end November 10. (People can order bags at FHEgoesgreen@hotmail. com.)

Fletcher Hills Elementary is doing its part in the fight against the urban tumbleweed. Thank you for the motivating article that inspired a school, and hopefully a community, to recycle, reduce, and reuse!

Annie DeGraff
Fletcher Hills Elementary PTA

Answer, Rabbi

Curious why Rabbi Rosenthal (“Sheep and Goats,” October 16) was not asked the question found at the end of the other “Sheep and Goats” columns: “What happens when we die?”

Paul Richard
via email

Matthew Lickona responds: I was unable to speak with Rabbi Rosenthal after the evening Yom Kippur service, but I called him later, and here’s what he said: “In Judaism, as with many other things, there’s not one simple, easy answer. If I could give you a simple answer, the simple answer is, we don’t know. Judaism has a range of beliefs; anywhere from physical resurrection at the time of the Messiah; to the eternity of the soul with God in heaven; to the belief that once you’re dead, you’re dead, and there’s nothing afterwards. There’s also the belief that you may die physically but you live on in the thoughts and minds and hearts of the people you leave behind. And I found out that Jews who practice mysticism do believe in reincarnation. So it’s pretty much ‘You can believe whatever you want to believe.’ The only thing we don’t believe in, explicitly, is eternal damnation in hell. There’s a belief in a purgatory, but there, people eventually make up for their sins and go to heaven. So it’s really wide open.”

Run, Rico, Run!

This is concerning Rico Gardiner’s letter (October 16) in response to letters from other Reader readers who took exception to his rather harsh views of San Diego.

Mr. Gardiner, you failed to address the question posited by one, if not both, of your critics, which I will now restate: if you hate it here so much, why don’t you leave? You are obviously a person of discernment and sophistication who doesn’t fit in with San Diego’s lowbrow beer-and-burrito culture (or what passes for culture around here). How it must gall you to be surrounded on a daily basis by such a knuckle-dragging bunch of rubes, yokels, and slack-jaws.

You need to spread your wings and fly, man, fly! Off to the big city you should go, the sooner the better. Why waste your life in this Podunk when you could be basking in the refinement and culture that is the essence of that shining city to the north, Los Angeles? While we San Diegans lack the necessary wit to appreciate such things, you obviously do not.

Again, I must return to the original question of what is it that keeps you here, moldering in the provinciality that defines San Diego? Is it a job? No problem, there are jobs aplenty in L.A. An ankle monitor? Don’t worry, parole doesn’t last forever. Whatever it is that keeps you here, I hope for your sake that you can overcome it and escape from this awful place.

A few caveats about L.A. They also have “silly sports teams,” as do most of the other “real” cities in the U.S., so you will still have to live with that. They also occasionally eat burritos, as well as drink beer up there, but I’m certain that a bon vivant such as yourself will be able to cope.

Run, Rico, run, while you still can! And don’t let the door hit you in the a**.

David Lathrap
Pacific Beach

Brown Has Big Feet

As Matt Potter was preparing his October 2 story (“Breaking News”) about the referendum challenging secretly negotiated changes to Stockton’s general plan, I wish he had taken the time to call the Alliance for Responsible Planning. The alliance was the group sponsoring the referendum, with the support of the Stockton Peace Officers’ Association, community and business leaders, the A.G. Spanos Companies, and myself. We came together because we were outraged that the Stockton City Council, by a 4–3 vote, had dramatically changed the City’s general plan that took five years and hundreds of public meetings to prepare.

Jerry Brown rode into town, threatened a costly lawsuit to a financially strapped city, and left no time for public input.

Just so Mr. Potter does not fret about it, he should know that Mr. Spanos did not support me for mayor. He supported my opponent.

Attorney General Brown’s overambitious quest to be California’s next governor has led him to trample local planning efforts.

Fortunately, more than 25,000 Stockton residents signed our referendum petitions — nearly the same number of people that voted in the last municipal election — and the imminent referendum led to a settlement with the City that guarantees the public will be able to participate as changes to the general plan are discussed in the future.

Gary A. Podesto
Former mayor of Stockton, 1997–2004
Watsonville

Matt Potter responds: The item never said anything about Spanos supporting Podesto for mayor. We fully reported Spanos being behind the measure and Attorney General Jerry Brown’s role in the planning controversy. A follow-up item noted the City’s settlement.

The Dreaded Santee Bloc

Re Reader Puzzle. I have stopped submitting entries because of the huge Santee bloc of entries each week — the people who don’t add a comment line.

And when the Santee bloc gets one letter wrong, they are all wrong.

Something underhanded is going on — several entrants have voiced that even in their comment line.

Entering the puzzle is no longer fun, when you see such a large bloc of people from the same place all winning together and each one never makes a comment.

There are always those people who ruin it for all the rest because of greed!

Ray Baterich
North Park

According to a phone call to the Reader, many of the entrants come from a Santee nursing home. — Editor

LL Dull J

I find it baffling that you continue to pay Josh Board for his “Crasher” column on a weekly basis. It commits two journalistic sins that should be unforgivable: it’s very poorly written and is insufferably dull.

By all means, the column should be an interesting one; the premise of it is, in theory, wide open to a varied and entertaining column each week. But the pedantic manner in which Mr. Board describes the parties he attends might as well be the result of an autistic person describing their trip to the DMV. Focused on minute and unimportant details and written in one-sentence paragraphs, a style more befitting the “See Dick Run” series of reading primers, the columns turn parties at James Cameron’s mansion or a record-release party for LL Cool J, events at which interesting things conceivably must be occurring, into deadening affairs of soul-crushing tedium.

Mr. Board’s tendency to focus on his own actions during these parties (his most recent column diverged from the party to explain how he left, went to a Mexican restaurant, and tried to order a series of items only to eventually leave without eating when none of them were available) only further serves to suggest that he is uninterested in the parties and would be better off updating a Twitter feed instead of writing about them. Journalism that is primarily focused on the journalist can work. Hunter S. Thompson routinely turned himself into the story. But the life-sapping diversions into Mr. Board’s own affairs are reminiscent of what Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would have been like had it been written by Andy Rooney.

I attended two of the parties that Mr. Board “crashed” for columns within the past six months. One was for his column “Sumo Follies” (August 6), where Mr. Board spent a substantial portion of the column talking about how he played another partygoer in horse on the outskirts of the party. The other party was the recent Intense Individual party (October 23), in which Mr. Board begged out of paying the charitable cover charge and went on to write up an eclectic party in a manner in which I imagine that a blind person’s fed-up personal assistant would describe it to them minutes before quitting in disgust.

The other thing that boggles my mind is the style, or lack thereof, in which the column is written. A paragraph that consists of one run-on sentence will give way to one made up solely of sentence fragments. At times it sounds like an internal monologue without any sort of filter, only one that is processing roughly two thoughts per minute. A recent column began “I received word about a few parties down south on a Friday that I was to drive up to L.A.” Boy, if that undiagrammable sentence does not grab the reader by the cheeks and yank his attention down to the page, I don’t know what would! Here is how a few great opening lines would go if they were written by Josh Board:

1. I received word that it was the best of times on a Friday that I was to drive to L.A. My girlfriend disagreed. “It was the worst of times,” she said.

2. I was to drive up to L.A. on a Friday when I received word of a few down south parties that were occurring from a guy who called me and said, “Call me Ishmael.”

3. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four Privet Drive were having a party down south on a Friday that I was to drive up to L.A., on the 5, which is the highway that goes to L.A.

I’m not really sure what the goal is of the “Crasher” column. I wonder what the satisfaction and/or return rate is of Mr. Board to parties that have had him write them up. I can confidently say that his descriptions of the parties he attends are woefully inadequate, and he does not appear to engage in the parties to get an accurate perception of what is actually going on. The party crasher column could be an entertaining read each week if written by someone who had even the most basic sense of how to write an entertaining column. Instead, it is doomed to be a constant embarrassment to party attendees, fans of grammar, and San Diegans in general. I suggest you audition new writers for this admittedly interesting concept, and tell Josh Board that he’s written his last meandering run-on description of how he thought that there would be appetizers at a party but there weren’t, so he went to stand by the pool where he noticed that some of the lights decorating the palm trees were out, and he meant to mention this to the host but he forgot to.

Conor Lastowka
via email