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San Diego’s newest corporate darling, Bridgepoint Education
RE #127: OU appears to be accredited in good standing by North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. By comparison, National University has had, lost, and regained Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation over the past decades. It appears that University of Phoenix and Southwestern College may not be WASC-accredited institutions, but I haven't checked lately. Just about any field grade promotion above Captain/Major requires an advanced degree of some sort, and having a US Army War College Master in Strategic Studies is a good feather in one's cap if one plans to pin on stars later in one's careers. Failing to get admitted to the War College need not derail one's path to eventual 20-year retirement and a Legion of Honor as a wonderful parting gift if OU offers an accredited alternative.— May 18, 2010 12:56 p.m.
Your Tax Dollars are Being Used to Destroy Irreplaceable Historic Structures
Things in this comment thread are pointing to the San Diego County Public Law Library. In the first-floor reading room, there will be reading material on CEQA designed for practicing attorneys. The materials are written by other practicing attorneys with experience and/or judges as references, and will no doubt contain radioactive nuggets on both sides, either obeying CEQA or getting around CEQA as part of representing clients. I am most definitely not a judge or attorney, but I was a part-time shelver in the Justice Complex downtown while I was tutoring at City College and taking the odd paralegal class... The Law Library's "card catalog": http://millennium.sdcll.org/ According to Millennium search results, CEQA materials are found around KFC610 in the California Reading Room. Looking at *Practice under the California Environmental Quality Act* (KFC610 .K67) won't give you direct facts on the project, but the practice guide checklists will tell you things at least considered by project participants as they prepared paperwork later filed with city agencies. Things considered but not covered will be key areas of vulnerability. This is just one source: check with the law librarians to see if there are other local regs that just might have been ignored by project participants as deal-killers. Law librarians can't actually advise you, but they can help you find materials for you to make your own informed decisions about. I was not paying attention to it earlier this year, but apparently the state grabbed a lot of redevelopment money from San Diego, and the redevelopment agencies went howling. Bets are that in the following scramble to obtain alternate funding sources, potential investor names have been revealed on paper or online somewhere for investor review, or the project could face collapse from a lack of confidence in completion of the deal. It would be amusing to see if Wylie Allen shows up as author of any law review article on CEQA... Experience teaches me that it is not a good idea to be your own attorney. At the same time, attorney time is very expen$ive, and the more you know about relevant law and gather "material" facts ahead of time, the faster and less expensive time will be when you actually have to get one. As a potential pitfall, reflect carefully on anything that may cause a project participant to run from the room screaming "interference with my contract" while speed-dialing Developer Legal Aid (AKA any politician not running for re-election). Many investors, developers, consultants and lobbyists consider anonymity to be a valued asset worth defending at nearly any cost.— May 18, 2010 12:31 p.m.
Happy Pill
RE #13: I bet there's an Rx for pills covering that, too!— May 18, 2010 11:19 a.m.
San Diego’s newest corporate darling, Bridgepoint Education
Both the article and the comments are fascinating as to the sociology of higher education in the context of academic upgrading of labor in a relatively free market, where educational institutionalism is the 800-pound humanoid in the house. All of the above seems to be tied to the fact that for a few years, there has been no Department of Consumer Affairs board of private post-secondary education in our state government. From http://www.bppe.ca.gov/ : "On October 11, 2009, Governor Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill (AB) 48 (Portantino, Chapter 310, Statutes of 2009). AB 48 is known as the Private Postsecondary Education Act of 2009 ('Act') and establishes the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education within the Department of Consumer Affairs. The Act became operative on January 1, 2010." For people unfamiliar with this new Bureau, a PowerPoint presentation: http://www.bppe.ca.gov/about_us/info_session.pdf The Bureau-related legislation, emergency regulations, and noticed proposed changes: http://www.bppe.ca.gov/lawsregs/index.shtml Until AB 48, I was thinking of starting my own online university peddling associate degrees in religious studies with an emphasis in FEMA-certified comprehensive emergency management... hopefully a good sell as a timely end-of-the-Mayan-calendar curriculum, given current market volatility as a backdrop.— May 18, 2010 11:01 a.m.
Your Tax Dollars are Being Used to Destroy Irreplaceable Historic Structures
I deserve to be kicked in the head by a mule. Looking back at the http://www.spoke.com/info/pBRWaH9/JayWentz page, I finally looked at the one co-worker name that has no job title by it: Lakisha Jarrett. Developer Reese Jarrett was the president of the Southeastern Economic Development Corporation (SEDC, subordinate redevelopment agency to San Diego Redevelopment Agency) when Carolyn Smith came on board a decade and a half ago. Smith was most recently denied a 6-digit golden parachute by San Diego Superior Court after enough mayoral mayhem ensued once she was found to have mis-directed accountant-hiring money that she used for unauthorized staff bonuses. As for Mr. Jarrett, a local private school closed when his board couldn't make payroll, and most real assets of Carter Reese and Associates were recently auctioned off during the housing market downturn. The Carter Reese project Citrus Heights in Lemon Grove has already generated at least three legal actions, including UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. SDG&E (http://www.justice.gov/usao/cas/press/cas70713-SD…). On this stuff, I have blogs... The fact that Ms. Jarrett's name appears as a Hampstead Partners employee with no job title attached is... well... damn interesting. It could mean nothing. It more likely means everything. In the least, it does seem to mean that Hampstead Partners has connections deep into that alternate universe of developers, well-heeled investors, consultants, and professional lobbyists who are especially familiar with our council members and redevelopment boards.— May 17, 2010 10:26 p.m.
Your Tax Dollars are Being Used to Destroy Irreplaceable Historic Structures
Also see http://www.spoke.com/info/pBRWaH9/JayWentz which lists Wylie Allen as "associate counsel" for Hampstead Partners Inc.— May 17, 2010 3 p.m.
Your Tax Dollars are Being Used to Destroy Irreplaceable Historic Structures
To not burn yourselves out, it is important to know what to focus on. Know who you are going up against: http://www.theboulevard.org/Projects.htm The Boulevard@North Park project appears to be a project of Hampstead Partners. The California Secretary of State has two listings for a "Hampstead Partners": Entity Name: HAMPSTEAD PARTNERS, INC. Entity Number: C1920053 Date Filed: 12/28/1994 Status: ACTIVE Jurisdiction: CALIFORNIA Entity Address: 4250 LOUISIANA ST Entity City, State, Zip: SAN DIEGO CA 92104 Agent for Service of Process: JAY WENTZ Agent Address: 4250 LOUISIANA ST Agent City, State, Zip: SAN DIEGO CA 92104 Entity Name: HAMPSTEAD PARTNERS DEVELOPMENT, INC. Entity Number: C2287532 Date Filed: 02/21/2002 Status: ACTIVE Jurisdiction: CALIFORNIA Entity Address: 4250 LOUISIANA STREET Entity City, State, Zip: SAN DIEGO CA 92104 Agent for Service of Process: JAY WENTZ Agent Address: 4250 LOUISIANA STREET Agent City, State, Zip: SAN DIEGO CA 92104 I did not check exhaustively; there may be a number of limited liability companies, one for each project, as a means of absorbing legal papers by others with a cause without exposing the partners' corporate assets. For vanity purposes (probably to attract that kind of money), there is a La Jolla listing at http://www.lajollabythesea.com/members/detail.php… : Hampstead Partners 1205 Prospect St 450 La Jolla, CA 92037-4415 (858) 551-5303 IMPORTANT: please be aware that the San Diego Redevelopment Agency is actually the San Diego City Council members when they are not being the City Council. You may find that on approaching a City Council member with your concerns, the council member (and staffers/interns) may tell you "Oh, that's a Redevelopment Agency issue" and go about her or his merry way with pencil erasers stuffed in her/his ears. You may find much better leverage by checking directly into Hampstead Partners to discover who exactly is the money behind the name. There is a reason the Boulevard@North Park project is being promoted by an apparent shell of a low-key real estate corporation that does not have its own website or published email address. Remember what Deep Throat told the Washington Post reporters about the Watergate Break-in before Nixon went on TV to tell us he was not a crook: FOLLOW THE MONEY. Don't forget that the partners' main motivation is in seeing that the project reaches completion, or a few somebodies do not get their commission checks. To hear your concerns or prepare to buy you off, they may even spring for dinner. To help you along the way, see the following 2006 press release and realize that the mentioned "Prestigious Hotel Management Company" has a definite financial interest in not having its hotel surrounded by an unfinished "affordable rental work force housing project": http://www.ventanahotels.com/up/load/FINALVentana…— May 17, 2010 2:50 p.m.
Kick in the Pants
For all the City's lusting for more, there has yet to be a public hearing about that 3% electricity franchise fee that was apparently set in stone back in 1970. Setting it to 5% would help to cut our current budget deficit. With $8 billion coming in to SDG&E parent Sempra Energy last year, the public utility can afford it. Setting it to 20% until all of the power lines are underground would be a perfect incentive to substantially reduce our collective risk from wildfires and completely eliminate our projected budget deficit.— May 11, 2010 11:01 a.m.
Economists Exult over Job Gains. Be Wary
"One statistic that bothers me is the government's birth/death adjustment model. This is a computerized estimate of jobs created by small business that are not captured in standard reporting procedures. Again, this is a computer ESTIMATE -- it is not a count of actual jobs. The government estimated that 188,000 jobs uncounted jobs were created by small business in April -- larger than anything for many months." I am intrigued and fascinated by the possibility that these estimates might actually include people who have dropped out of the traditional job market in favor of joining the underground, cash-only or barter-trade economy, with no positive impact on local, state or federal tax revenues.— May 11, 2010 10:05 a.m.
Tokyo Decadence
As a City College English grammar tutor in 1991, I got to see a lot of Japanese students studying there instead of at the more expensive ESL private schools here in San Diego. The first time one of the young ladies brought in a vividly-detailed essay on the high school teenage sex trade in Tokyo with older businessmen, my jaw dropped. At least one tutor later got a job in Tokyo teaching English as soon as he had received his BA in the major at SDSU. From her essay then, the newly American teenage tendency towards "sexting" makes perfect sense now. My interest in seeing this film soon is purely as a sociological observer. At least, I will keep telling myself that.— April 29, 2010 10:53 a.m.