OC Blog

The 2.5 Freeway

In honor of the $2.5 million that the OCTA "advanced" to finally complete the flyover for the 55 <> 405 connection (Ready to fly over), let's have that section RENUMBERED so we won't forget that someone owes somebody a pile of money for messing up a concrete and steel bridge.  This alchemy did turn to gold for CH2MHill and C. C. Meyers, but left us holding the bag.

OC Supervisor and OCTA member Bill Campbell must have just had it with Caltrans when he exclaimed "We've got to make sure these things don't happen in the future."  Bill might also ask where the performance bond was to cover this mistake as he looks for these contractors to cough up the dough for this inexcusable engineering that’s inconvenienced everyone with lookey-loo delays for so many years.

The grander issue here, though, is how this $14.5 million, two-year delayed boondoggle provides a benefit since it's only for carpool lanes.  Ray Haynes, one of the brighter bulbs in the Assembly from nearby Murrieta, had studied them and found "The average car-pool lane carries only 7 percent of freeway traffic, yet it consumes 25 percent of the capacity on a four-lane freeway. This means the remaining 93 percent of the traffic is crammed into 75 percent of the freeway space." 

In 2002, the Reason Foundation, a Libertarian think tank, said "The recently released journey-to-work figures from the 2000 census reveal what many of us have long suspected: carpooling is a flop.  Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars adding carpool lanes to congested freeways, carpooling declined from 13.4% of work trips in 1990 to 11.2% in 2000.  Carpooling's mode share declined in 36 of the largest 40 metro areas-including highly congested Los Angeles and San Francisco."

So besides getting stuck for bad engineering, does this also mean that 7% of us will benefit from what 100% of us paid for?

You might be a liberal if...

A terrific test of political temperament:

http://www.roanoke.com/columnists/lynch%5C16203.html

Pensionomics.com Blog

I just discovered this blog, Pensionomics.com, dedicated to "Seeking Signs of Sanity in the World of Pension Funds." I've only perused it briefly, but it looks to be a great resource for tracking and learning more about the pension fund universe -- a handy resource in this era of Social Security reform and budget-busting public employee pensions.

Orange County has earned it's own category in the blog archives -- lucky us -- and Pensionomics.com even maintains a list of Pension Heroes and Zeros, which includes our own Armando Ruiz:

Armando Ruiz is the latest Pension Zero. See previous post for complete list. Armando took advantage of a legal loophole to increase his pension from $59K to $108K by retiring from his Community College board position and his Irvine Valley College counselor position on the same day.

Four days after resigning, he was re-elected to his board position, qualifying for an additional $9800 per year.

Armando, do us all a favor and try not to snort too loudly as you feast at our taxpayer trough. Thanks, bud.

See our own previous posts on Mr. Ruiz here and here.

Strangely, Mike Clesceri is missing from the list. Obviously an oversight, which we'll repair by nominating Mike to a proper place of honor in the Pension Zero hall of fame.

Parkland and Public Access

A couple of items in the OC Register yesterday and today got me thinking about public access to parkland.

In his column yesterday, Frank Mickadeit relates hiking out in 155 acres the county acquired last November. One of his hiking companions, Silverado-Modjeska Parks and Recreation District Board Member Mike Boeck, stated the land should be part of adjoining Cleveland National Forest because the feds are in a better position to maintain it and open it to public access.

I wholeheartedly agree with Boeck's goal of providing public access to this new parkland, but disagree about turning it over to the feds. It's true the county government lacks the funds to properly manage this land. But the federal government -- thanks to the Clinton Administration's acquisition binge in the 1990s, has far more land than it can properly manage.

And the anti-public access groups the OCR editorial warns about have far more leverage in restricting public access to federal lands than to county parkland. When it comes to county parkland, a majority of the elected county supervisors have the final say. With federal lands, it's a drawn out bureaucratic process where organized environmental interests groups have the advantage in terms of resources, organization, the ability for sustained lobbying and the sympathy of unelected federal lands bureaucrats.

As the OCR editorial points out:

To environmental purists, no forest or public land can be pristine enough or protected enough.

It's the environmental purists who increasingly dominate that movement. They want to preserve every square inch of undeveloped land, but prohibit anyone but themselves from actually seeing or enjoying it.

Funny Funny Stuff

Suffering from post-Christmas blues? A relative e-mailed me the link to this incredibly funny blog full o' news parodies, Iowahawk. I've only read these two posts so far, but both are guaranteed to make you laugh (unless you an uptight PC liberal):

• ACLU Unveils Religion-Free Holiday Program
• Top Scientists Warn: Sea Gods Angry

Enjoy!

Tsunami Victims

The tragic death toll from the tsunamis has reached an estimated 100,000, and is predicted to climb even higher. This an almost unimaginable number of human lives to be wiped out by walls of water.

Amazon.com has set-up an easy way to donate to the Red Cross and help the survivors of this disaster. Please give.

We'll keep the link up on the right side of the blog.

Anaheim to Arte: No Welshing!!

Great op-ed by Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle in today's OC Register. Pringle very publicly and matter-of-factly reminds Angels owner Arte Moreno what a sweet deal he has from the citizens of Anaheim, and that the least he can do is uphold what little that bargain requires of the Angels.

Frankly, I am stunned by Moreno's public relations ineptitude. He bought the Angels, he generated a tremendous amount of good will from Orange Countians.  He was this sort of regular guy-next-door type who cut beer prices at Angel Stadium (always a winner with the proles).

Now he's squandered that goodwill with his weird obsession with re-naming his team the Los Angeles Angels, and now getting rid of David Eckstein. What a boob.

Nice going, Curt.  Keep up the good work.

Not so fast, folks

The Register took a predictable position (Supervisors won't cross this border) and supported the Board of Supervisor’s unwillingness last week to pursue the importation of prescription drugs from Canada. Their reasoning – “one of our pet peeves is when local governments try to insert themselves into federal issues” –  sounded reasonable enough, but they BLEW OFF an opportunity to save a pile of money:

Norberto Santana Jr.’s well written OCR article from 12/22 (County rejects buying drugs from Canada) said  “A review of the top 100 prescriptions used by county employees found that the county and employees combined would save more than $1 million a year by using drugs imported from Canada.”

The Register thought deliberately breaking the law wasn’t the “message” that should be sent to Washington.  Their timidity, however, disregards the better position that one of the best ways to send someone that message is to take one’s $11 million business elsewhere and make it known why.

Even local “union officials…said the savings outweighed any potential risk of legal action by the federal government.” Santana noted that four States, “Vermont, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota had begun importing drugs from Canada, generating significant savings.”  Our little ol’ County isn’t going to take the heat from a Republican administration that these BLUE states might, especially now with the FDA having grander things to worry about than counterfeit Lipitor.

The Register needs to use its bully pulpit more effectively and in OUR better interests.

Elizabeth Pearson & the Montage

You have to read the Left Angeles Times article on the Montage Resort's attempts to build a golf course and villas on -- gasp -- wilderness!

A mournful tone saturates the piece, starting with the headline: "Laguna Beach Sees Grass Roots Wilting." You can practically hear LAT staff writers Kim Yoshino and Christine Hanley sniffling back the tears as they write how no grass roots army of Laguna Beach libs has materialized to stop those evil developers from building things.

They then practically accuse Laguna Beach Mayor Elizabeth Pearson of corruption. What evidence do they have, you might ask? She was "unabashedly chauffeured" by Montage officials to say nice things about them to the Beverly Hills City Council. Unfortunately, Hanley and Yoshino don't tell us why Pearson and the Montage people were talking to the Beverly Hills City Council, thereby depriving the episode of any context from which to draw an informed conclusion -- other than Hanley and Yoshino think Pearson should have been abashed about being chauffeured.

The two LAT staff writers then make a point of telling us that Pearson's then fiance (and now husband) Ernie Schneider is a consultant to the Montage on their golf course project. It's not illegal for Schneider to do that (in fact, it's how he makes a living), nor is it illegal for Schneider and Pearson to go out with each other. In fact, none of their activities mentioned in the article are illegal or unethical -- but Hanley and Yoshino certainly do their best to make them sound sleazy.

Hanley's and Yoshino's article isn't a news story -- it's a full-throated lament that there aren't enough of the old Laguna Beach no-growthers left to stop this project. The writers practically deify the 8,000 marchers who exercised their political freedom to help stop an Irvine Co. development 15 years ago. But when the Montage people exercise their political freedom to help oust a councilman who was hostile to their pursuit of free enterprise, it is cast as a sinister and somehow illegitimate exercise in corporate greed.

Can you imagine a mirror-image Left Angeles Times article lamenting the erosion of property rights at the hands of environmentalists?

Orange Coast & The New Majority

I was thinking after my previous post that I may have been a little tough on Martin Wisckol's article. Especially when you compare it to the article on the New Majority that ran in the November 2003 issue of Orange Coast.  This puff piece, authored by former Left Angeles Times columnist Jerry Hicks, can best be described as the journalistic equivalent of an oral sex act.

Granted, Orange Coast magazine isn't known for hard-hitting journalism. What's most interesting about the article is what it doesn't say: it completely omits any mention of the New Majority's maiden mission: taking over the Orange County GOP Central Committee and ousting Tom Fuentes. Unless you count this vague sentence:

But other candidates the New Majority supported were defeated by more conservative candidates in the March 2000 GOP primary.

I suppose Hicks inserted that sentence as a fig leaf to avoid writing a completely dishonest article, although it is more like a blade of grass than a fig leaf. It's especially disappointing because Hicks was a long-time professional journalist and presumably wouldn't pen such a dishonest piece and unbalanced piece. In fact, he was still an LAT OC-edition staff writer when the whole New Majority anti-Fuentes jihad was going on, and so deliberately omitted information which he was perfectly aware he was directly relevant and basic to the story he was writing.

It makes sense that Hick's sycophantic puff piece on the New Majority ran in Orange Coast. After all, the New Majority is really just the political expression of the self-indulgent world-view that Orange Coast exemplifies.

Especially revealing is the photo that accompanies the Hick's article: a group shot of Higby, Tucker, General Lyon and several other leading members, plus Chris St. Hilaire and their executive director Wendy Cantor Hales (who previously served in the same position at the Lincoln Club). The New Majority is supposed to be all about making the GOP more inclusive to women and minorities, yet their leadership group photo is of a bunch of rich white guys and the woman they employ to plan their parties for them. Now that's diversity for you.

One day it will dawn on these guys that in California, the GOP's growth isn't coming from the boob-jobs-and-Bombay-gin set at the Balboa Bay Club, but in the exploding suburbs of icky Riverside, San Bernardino and north and east San Diego counties, home to young families that go to church, oppose abortion and don't get all worked up about assault weapons.