DISQUS

This is the same Public Works Dept that can't get around to letting us replace their unsuitable exotic parkway trees, plunked in front of our residences, with signature native trees. California oaks are threatened, but the only oak they approve of is English holly oak. Left on their own, our Pub Works 'professionals' will never get around to timely revising their list of 'approved trees' concocted decades ago by 'professionals' living in east coast cities, at a time when 'exotic' meant 'good' and 'native' meant 'evil'.

And this is the same Public Works Dept that recently spent lots of money for brand new 'efficient' street sweeping equipment. Sounds extremely rational, until you ask the politically incorrect question, exactly what high priority purpose is all this efficiency serving? What does their ceremonial once-a-week rain-or-shine-or-nothing routine street sweeping (not just storm drain cleaning) actually achieve for residents? (Especially us residents who DON'T believe that eventual city sweeping absolves you from responsibility to pick up the litter you've just tossed into the street.) Maybe the real 'reason' is to provide an excuse for the city to weekly ticket parked cars? - and someday give 'em the boot?

Thanks for quoting Matt Lyons, who is totally correct.

He has identified one of the two big reasons - inappropriate water-guzzling landscaping - why we are being kept from having ample and readily affordable water supplies without worries as to where more water may come from. Such landscaping is needless. California native shrubs (as in our front yard and many others') not only are tuned to the rainfall that we get, and require minimum maintenance, but also if planted in sufficient variety give attractive blooms all year round. Right now, toyons are presenting gorgeous and very seasonal red berries. In a couple months we can expect blue and white blooms of ceanothus (Calif. lilac - long popular in England!), and red fuschia-flowered gooseberries.

The other reason is Long Beach' amazing surplus of needlessly impermeable hardscape (on wide streets, parking lots, and concreted or asphalted yards). This hardscape converts what should be a ready benefit of local rain - inexpensive recharge of ground water - into an expensive problem instead - rapid runoff and flooding, requiring piping to remove further and wastefully to the ocean.

Before agreeing to 'invest' any big sums in pavement and piping 'infrastructure' (as was the stated intent of the recently defeated Measure I, and apparently still massively on the mayor's wish list of goodies desired from the Obama administration), Long Beach citizens should insist that existing needlessly impermeable paving be replaced by permeable surface.

Thanks for quoting Matt Lyons, who is on target and quite correct.

He has identified one of the two big reasons - inappropriate water-guzzling landscaping - why we are being kept from having ample and readily affordable water supplies without worries as to where more water may come from. Such landscaping is needless. California native shrubs (as in our front yard and many others) not only are tuned to the rainfall that we get, and require minimum maintenance, but also if planted in sufficient variety give attractive blooms all year round. Right now, toyons are presenting gorgeous and very seasonal red berries. In a couple months we can expect blue and white blooms of ceanothus (Calif. lilac - long popular in England!), and red fuschia-flowered gooseberries.

The other reason is Long Beach' amazing surplus of needlessly impermeable hardscape (on wide streets, parking lots, and concreted or asphalted yards). This hardscape converts what should be a ready benefit of local rain - inexpensive recharge of ground water - into an expensive problem instead - rapid runoff and flooding, requiring piping to remove further and wastefully to the ocean.

Before agreeing to 'invest' any big sums to update or maintain pavement and piping 'infrastructure' (as was the stated intent of the recently defeated Measure I, and apparently still massively on the mayor's wish list of goodies desired from the Obama administration), Long Beach citizens should insist on updating of needlessly impermeable pavement to permeable surface.

I agree - who cares about Palin's foreign non-record, when her actual record consists of immoral (as well as ignorant) domestic deeds and policies.

Yes, the Futurliner seems to have been a great Parade of Progress promo device, to assure us that benign and even wonderful GM was working hard for our great Future. But wasn't this the same GM that a few years later was quietly sabotaging effective public transit - rail and later even bus - everywhere in the USA that it could, esp. here in LA? And which continued its Trojan Horse tactics here in California just a few years ago by leasing and then recalling and destroying electric cars? The Futurliner is a memento of a consistent bait-n-switch track record: pre-emption of promising and practical technology, in order to derail it into mere nostalgiac might-have-been.

There's nothing wrong with many studies and reports and opinions, not just one or two. Except, with so much to potentially gain or lose, why did PoLB folks wait so long, until well after instead of well before Council asked for a study??

And why should either the Council or PoLB encourage only an inhouse or a single external contractor to study San Pedro Bay structure and reconfig possibilities? One would think that many academic computer modeling and engineering departments could be encouraged to put their students and interns to work and cheaply produce varioius studies. Indeed, some years ago a rather good initial student study was for a while web-posted by Surfrider.

For decades, until a few years ago, in the SF Bay, the Army Corps of Engineers maintained an SF Bay Model which (besides still being a tourist attraction) was then used to generate all kinds of studies and reports, testing all kinds of reconfigurations of all kinds of existing and possible new structures in SF Bay. Unlike the LB Council and PoLB's long-insistent 11-th century attitude about possibilities here in San Pedro Bay - i.e. that ignorance and status quo are the divinely ordained sides of the unique coin of bliss - the attitude in SF Bay was that more knowledge about possibilities was always a good thing.

By the way, just because the Corps has control of the breakwater doesn't mean what was so long assumed here in LB: that anyone else can't credibly study it, and to boot must wait for suitable Congressional funding and directives to the Corps.

One thing that seems to have escaped attention is that possible beneficial reconfigs can concern more than just the east breakwater: they may well involve other other existing or potential structures. Another thing that apparently has escaped attention is that net benefits many be of different kinds, and therefore the 'best' answer will depend on the driving questions and on the assumptions. In particular, questions may concern not only surf restoration and pollution flushing, but also how do we deal with tsunami threats, and in particular how are we planning for the decades-hence future waterworld that, given present City Hall policies, will be the fate of many Long Beach neighborhoods? A future in which - thanks to the global warming promoted by continued carbon combustion from the likes of PolB's global trade and Boeing's massive air transport - enterprises heavily fostered (pun OK) by LB City Hall - Greenland ice will melt or float away, thereby raising sea level 8 meters (25 feet).

Type your comment here.

Yes, as Lindaonline notes, City Hall continues its 'shoot first ask after' approach to 'planning' . Its folk make super-professional salaries for non- (or even anti-) professional approaches to their work. If the City Council had a clue, they would fire Pat West for permitting this sort of sleaze anti-planning so-called 'budgeting'.

Apparently the District's reporter now believes that Foster's bond proposal (whatever and wherever it actually and specifically is at the moment) actually earmarks money for a new main library. Maybe not enough money, but that's missing the real irony.

Namely, there's no legally guaranteed connection between Foster's bonds and the proposed parcel tax. The actual legal lingo of the parcel tax proposal merely restricts the tax money to certain broad kinds of uses labeled 'infrastructure', but contains no commitment to use the money for any specific projects or in any specific amounts or mechanism, let alone to repay bonds, or indeed to finance Foster's bond proposal or his projects.

Yes, Laura sure is known now in Sacramento. And in DC, indeed Steny Hoyer and the rest now know all about her fiscal abilities. And yes, Laura is known well in Long Beach, and sure will deliver ... first for Laura first, and second for the LB establishment - more pollution, more poverty-pimping programs, whatever it takes.

[By the way, I recall how her avowed mentor Juanita's fliers used to brag about federal bucks brought to this area - and had nothing to say about whether her proposals and policy votes were any good (or made any difference) for the state or nation or world at large - or for that matter whether the extra local federal bucks were really financing useful stuff for us, as versus more port pollution.]

I remember one of Laura's great performances - zeniths for some, nadirs for the rest of us - in the LB Council, where she went to great lengths to stop a resolution by Bonnie et al on the proposed LNG terminal that merely declared a presumption that is already written into law, namely that a farther-away LNG terminal would be safer for us than a nearer one. Laura made sure that the resolution would simply say that the Council was concerned about safety - whatever that could mean.

Yes, the real issue is indeed the greater good of the community. That's why we can be very glad we have a choice now.

Yes, Dibs had a summer break from school and decided to use it to do this bit of civics. Bravo!

Yes, unlike Laura, Dibs has many articulate and evidently sincere and unmasked opinions. One is bound to disagree with some. For instance, I greatly disagree with his pseudo-progressive party-line on Iranian nukes. Just because other countries have nukes, and moreover the Bush regime has systematically lied and warmongered, does NOT make the Iranian regime noble (or even fit for this millennium), or their nukes a good or even very tolerable idea. It's the Iranian chief of state who has openly said he wants Israel destroyed (not vice versa). His govt. already sponsors hoodlum regimes in S. Lebanon and Gaza, featuring suicide killers that - even without nuclear weapons yet to hurl - are not impressed by the kind of deterrence that kept the Cold War from getting hot.

So Dibs is not an ideal alternative. But, at least he was able to rethink a lot of former opinion to change from Republican, while retaining one of the few virtues Republicans used to focus on, fiscal sobriety. Presumably he retains the ability to rethink further while staying fiscally sober.

Ironically, the sooner developers and others are stopped from carrying out their wishes and dreams to build more in the wetlands, the happier they or their descendants are going to be.

It is only a matter of time - which with every update on climate change seems to be shortening - before Greenland's glaciers have either melted or floated off onto the sea. That will raise sea levels by 25 feet or so, enough to permanently submerge all the local wetlands in question - along with various neighborhoods, e. g., Naples, Belmont Shore, the Port, and low-lying lands along both the rivers.

And don't forget that accelerated climate change is precisely what is being promoted heavily by the policies of the city of Long Beach and its favored enterprises (notably Port, Boeing, Airport), whose business it is to promote and rely heavily on massive transport fueled by carbon combustion (either the dirty cancer-causing kind or the presumably future 'green port' kind: the greenhouse and climate-change effects will be much the same either way).

The very fact that a large oceanside city with everything to lose from climate change is de facto so massively pushing for it, will have global repercussions on what will in fact be done (or rather, not done) effectively to stop it. Given present policies, submerged wetlands and a lot more is literally a slam-dunk bet for the future of Long Beach. SEA-DIP, the city's southeastern area plan (now in the works for revision) is aptly named.

I agree with commentator Dave that the really disturbing aspect is the once-again oligarchic secretive 'planning', centralized (per the city's 19th-century robber-baron corporate charter) in Foster and West and their cronies, in place of a local democratically-organized and run community and its extended discussions.

Hints of library closures are likely just another one of their duplicitous good-cop-bad-cop tactics (combining reassuring and friendly overt smiles with tacit arm-twisting) to induce the taxpayers this November to rubber stamp their (also secretively hatched and sprung) 'infrastructure' bond.

This approach is indeed, as the first comment put it, just one more instance of a 'podunk ...town ... incompetent city leadership'. But, contra other parts of that comment, aliens (legal or otherwise) and diversity are not the problem.

Ambitious immigrants (and others) indeed are a great reason FOR the library. On this, commentator Schlarb is not alone. When brought from Ukraina to the USA at the age of ten, my parents got sustained education not only in the public schools but very importantly - and for more years - in the main Milwaukee Public Library (main). I credit my mother's successful decades-delayed enrollment into and completion of BA studies in her late forties (at UC Berkeley) to the fact that she had this library access in her twenties.

The Main Branch is, after all and first of all, the Downtown neighborhood branch. It's one of the amenities that people tacitly assume they are getting when they buy those expensive condos. And to boot it supplies special services to various non-geographic city 'neighborhoods'. So it's fallacious to argue that other neighborhood branches can painlessly fill in for Main.

Moreover (maybe second after Acres) for most residents Main is the city's best unstructured non-virtual book-browsing experience. So, before arbitrarily deciding that big libraries (or even big open-browse warehouses of books, of any kind) should be passe, we need a discussion on how important and exactly how much unstructured non-virtual browsing we want to keep, and what is its value. Maybe not as much as we used to think, but maybe more than some people credit.

In general, as suggested by the conclusion of Dave's comment, we need discussion on 'the way to go'. I agree that nowadays most of the time (apart from an opportunity to lose oneself in hours of unstructured browsing), perhaps the most useful (as well as thereby busiest) book 'stores' and 'libraries' are being redefined to certain kinds of experience places, for coffee-snacks-conversation-computers-and books. I saw it happening, even twenty years ago, well before widespread Internet, when I lived on the Monterey Peninsula. It didn't take a B&N or Borders to succeed: you could be a large or small one-outlet enterprise, e.g. Thunderbird Cafe/Bookstore (Carmel) and Bookworks (Pacific Grove).

In every way Laura is showing herself to be the politicians' preferred
kind of pol. All these in-your-face events and expensies and shameless
taxpayers-owe-me perks, like the undisclosed foreclosures and unpaid bills,
and now the extra-expensive cars - all coupled with Steny Hoyer's special fundraiser for her.

All these are bearing out what I wrote lately elsewhere, namely:

With 2020 foresight, it's clear that Laura will be her party's nominee for pres in 2020.

Let's get back on track. Porn or no porn, your problem of adequately judging judges is real. But actually your problem it's just a part of a larger one - the inadequate (I'm tempted to say idiotic) approach followed in our system of selecting and then anointing long-term public decision-makers - judges or legislators or executive officers.

There's no reason that the public should have to perform ill-informed - or else excruciatingly time-consuming - character analyses and comparisons of candidates in order to see to it that good public-affairs decisions are made. The ancient Athenians had a far better way - genuine democracy - which is both less costly and more reliable. Namely, public-affairs decisions are made by short-term ad hoc decision juries of randomly selected but motivated ordinary citizens, not by career politicians selected by ill-informed expensive popularity-contest elections.

What a misleading headline - and so needlessly too!

The headline suggested a demolition of both Acres AND the next-door buildings. It would have taken no more (indeed fewer) letters and syllables (and more standard English, to boot) to write: "Demolition today of buildings next to Acres of Books."

Of course, this sort of headline, suggesting an erroneous and thereby panic-inspiring situation, does get reader attention. It got mine, because I had been under the impression - confirmed in your actual story text - that Acres still has time.

'Real Talk' writes: "I’d take Laura Richardson and all of her money problems over most of the weak, milquetoast, city hall politicians in Long Beach. At least she knows how to fight and what’s important to fight for. She’s one of a few elected officials in this city who doesn’t take marching orders from the unofficial mayor, Randy Gordon and the millionaire energy boss."

Real Talk sounds to be sharing real truth with real backbone. Except that when it comes to millionaire or billionaire energy bosses it aint so. Among other stiffing jobs, it was Laura that made sure that the City Council woundn't ever quite bring itself to say NO to LNG. She even stiffed a resolution (of Bonnie's) that simply restated what is already law, namely the presumption that the farther away an LNG terminal is, the safer it is. Yes, I admit that Laura knows what she wants, and that's primarily Laura. And at this rate she'll get it, what with opponents of the ilk we have just seen, who either perennially and incredibly promise everything to everyone, or can't utter two coherent sentences in a row.

'Back to the Land' has an important topic, but sadly the article is just another well-intentioned example of filler 'journalism of the quaint'.

Indeed, the article is blithely oblivious to or erroneous on basic fact. For one thing, Oaxaca state is NOT 2000 miles from Mexico City, nor even 500 miles airline.

And just because people 'elsewhere' are 'still' growing their own food (gee-whiz) does not entitle journalists to imply by omission that people who are doing it right here in California (urban, not to mention rural too) don't exist or don't count or aren't interesting enough, or have nothing to teach us.

In particular, why no mention of Long Beach Organic?! - or aren't they quaint enough or yuppie enough or New-York-Times enough or third-world enough to merit mention, let alone interviews?

So - (big discovery?) - subsistence farming is not 'the' answer to feeding the world's population? Can there be any answer at all - let alone a single big 'the' answer - so long as population is allowed to grow indefinitely?

According to the quoted Malkin, some people are actually skeptical about 'free' trade or industialized farming. Imagine! The sound reasons for the skepticism, go far deeper than a single NYTimes filler piece. For some accessible but solid reading of them, see for instance the first section of Michael Pollan's 'The Omnivore's Dilemma'.

Good article Theo and good comments from John and RKJ.

Yes, the LB establishment's version of 'green', meaning reduced pollution just from particulates, is on the way. However, just remember that reduced particulates do not equate to reduced global warming.

On the contrary, LB Council and City Hall and Chamber continue to foster (pun not amiss) a vision of a 'green' future which requires and promotes massive and ever more emissions from oil and gas combustion. The 'cleanest' possible emissions, pure greenhouse-gas CO2, will continue to result and increase from the massive oil and gas burning fostered by globalized industry and long-distance commerce and lots of air transport. All promoted by PoLA/LB, Boeing, and the likes of LGB - the local enterprises especially favored by the establishment. All to bring us more quickly to what the Chinese call 'interesting' times. This special LB kind of 'green' will accelerate melt or float of at least Greenland ice, thereby raising sea level enough to sink Belmont Shore and lots of other nice lower-lying LB properties, not least PoLB itself.

With Cheers for May Day - Joe

Of course elections cost. And of course the money is wasted. That's par for the course of our de-facto oligarchic government that likes to call itself an example of 'democracy'.

In regards actual needs of truly democratic and soundly deliberative government, the popularity polls called 'elections' - and the long-term offices that they fill - are both indeed elective - NOT needed. The alternative - already used very effectively in ancient Athens - is to simply involve you and me and all willing participating citizens as members (selected at random or by rotation) of decision juries. Each jury puts in the manageably short time needed for just one or a few well-deliberated decisions.

To be sure, such a directly democratic and effective arrangement would displease our oligarchic long-term rulers - whether elected politicians or appointed people like commissioners - because it does away with any perceived need for their political 'profession' and for all their self-indulgent games and perks (and opportunities for profitable corruption, through command of long-term strangleholds on decision-making power).

Indeed, in fairness to elections, their direct costs are just a fraction of the total extra costs of government by elective oligarchy rather than direct deliberative democracy.