12/11/19 City Council meeting open thread

Please use the comments to record your observations.

Restaurant closures on El Camino Real

San Diego Reader:

What’s happing to restaurants on Encinitas’ El Camino Real? In the last two months, eight restaurants have closed in the ten blocks between Encinitas Boulevard and Leucadia Boulevard.

The latest being on November 25. The owners of the Greek American Family Restaurant, opened since the 1980s, reportedly wanted to retire.

Gone are franchised or corporately owned restaurants of Noodles and Company, Subway, and Firehouse Subs. Also out of business, vacant, and up for lease are the former locations of locally owned businesses Pie Craft, Swirls Frozen Yogurt, and 2 Good 2 Be Bakery. (The McDonalds in the Encinitas Ranch Town Center was closed three weeks ago due to fire. Its expected to be reopened.)

101 is also seeing businesses struggle. There, it seems the rents are being set by the very profitable bars, and other types of businesses can't afford it. Two restaurants have failed quickly at the old El Callejon site, and it remains vacant, as do the former Whole Foods and Ace Hardware sites.

Car burglaries go unpunished

From the Inbox:

Car burglaries in some California cities are at crisis levels. Prosecutors say their hands are tied.

My street gets hit weekly. People don’t even bother reporting anymore.

From personal experience and Nextdoor.com posts, car burglaries seem to be common throughout Encinitas. Lack of response from the sheriff's department has led many people to stop bothering to report the crime.

What's your neighborhood experience?

Who is committing the burglaries? Vagrants, local druggie kids, gangs from out of town? Anybody know of anyone caught and prosecuted?

Leucadia Flooding!

At Encinitas Current:

Big storms bring big problems to Leucadia. Highway 101 and the businesses alongside it are in a natural drainage swale and they suffer the majority of flooding. The highway sits in lower than the rest of the corridor, with the high bluff tops to the west, and higher ground to the east, across the train tracks.

In 2001, the City paid $4 million to lay 2 miles of storm drain between Highway 101 and the train tracks. Although this alleviated some of the flooding it did little to fix the problem.

More of Leucadia's historic eucalyptus trees killed

Encinitas Votes:

Here is the report that Tony Kranz linked to when he said they were removed b/c of a fungus, but fungus is not mentioned here for any of these trees.

[link]

Mayor's newsletter: homeless parking lot, Olivenhain mega-project, SANDAG upzoning numbers

The mayor's newsletter on the Saxony homeless parking lot:

The Safe Parking program here will be closely regulated, will include 24-hour security, and will be monitored to prevent negative consequences for the adjacent neighborhood. Based on my tour of one of the other Safe Parking lots run by JFS in San Diego, and the profiles of the people who park there overnight, I'm confident that very few people will even know that they are there.

The 277-unit mega-project at Encinitas Boulevard and Rancho Santa Fe Road:

[...] we've received a large number of emails from those concerned and upset about the project.

There are still a lot of serious issues to work out. The city's priority is to make sure that the project provides a high degree of quality in the design, materials, function and aesthetic.

SANDAG's next round of upzoning:

Encinitas was assigned 1,554 housing units, after the previous housing cycle assigned us 2,353. The methodology of distribution was entirely based on the number of jobs and the amount of transit, without any carve-outs or exceptions. Solana Beach was assigned 875 housing units, up from 340 in the previous cycle, and was particularly unhappy, along with several other cities.

As the mayor of a city that spent years in a losing legal and regulatory battle with the state over our housing plan, I’m relieved that the SANDAG board didn’t go down the path of proposing a methodology that the state was sure to reject.

City commissioner wants to ban clean, cheap, plentiful natural gas

Union-Trib:

First came the plastic bag and polystyrene container bans. Now Encinitas may be exploring whether to limit natural gas use.

City Environmental Commissioner James Wang, who was instrumental in the city’s polystyrene and plastic bag ban campaigns, is asking his fellow commissioners to seek City Council approval for an ordinance prohibiting the installation of natural gas infrastructure in new buildings.