Average Encinitas retiree with 30 years of service gets more than $94,000 per year for life

You know how pension apologists claim that only a few abusers get huge pensions and the average government worker only gets a few thousand dollars per month?

Yeah, not so much.

Data from Transparent California show that the average Encinitas employee with a "full career" of 30 years or more is given $94,602 per year for life.  And no, it's not just skewed by Mark Muir.  The median is almost the same at $93,723.

Want to know why your streets are full of potholes, we don't have any money to build anything at Pacific View, and your city council wants to raise your taxes and fees?  Look no further.

Raw data here.

HoodLink endorses Cameron, Graboi

HoodLink, Encinitas' long-running grassroots newsletter, has come out in favor of Sheila Cameron for mayor and Julie Graboi for City Council, with a polite nod to Tony Kranz but an acknowledgement that Kranz and HoodLink's community have parted ways on the issues.

See the latest HoodLink here.

Council Candidate debate thread

What are they saying?

Subcommittee plans 1500-foot CN Tower, pasty white people with balloons at Pacific View

Yes, that's actually what they're showing in this subcommittee PowerPoint.



The image is from plans for Toronto's Ontario Place, which is enormous, commercial, and waterfront. In other words, it has absolutely nothing in common with Pacific View. (And the upper photo is not, as some people have suggested, the new development at Weidner's Gardens.)

But on a more serious note, aside from the subcommittee's poor PowerPoint skills and inappropriate image appropriation, the October 6 meeting raised a lot of serious concerns that somebody should have thought about earlier. Like, say, zoning for the new arts center!



Wait a minute... art galleries, music conservatories, dance studios, and recording studios are expressly prohibited? What kind of art center are we getting for $10 million?

Then there's the Coastal Commission approval (and they don't want anything that will impact parking at Moonlight Beach!), and the non-taxable bond limitations fiasco.  Not to mention that the city is too broke to build or operate anything on the site, which is why they are hiring expensive consultants to figure out how to raise fees on residents.  Click on over to Focus on Encinitas for the full scoop on the Pacific View SNAFU.

10/8/14 City Council meeting open thread

The current city council has continued prior councils' practice of not providing written summary minutes of council discussion, but only "action minutes" which state the outcomes. Encinitas Undercover will provide a forum for observers to record what occurs at each council meeting.

Please use the comments to record your observations.

More D-grade work from city consultants?

From the Inbox:

Dear Council Members and Cabinet Members,

Last night I attended a workshop that Parks and Recreation hosted which seems to be a justification for raising fees on citizens, if the heading "service and fee study," the first line of the announcement is to be believed. I spoke with presenters Al and Chris, who identify themselves as consultants in the field of recreation.

I disagree that the presentation that was given by Green Play should be considered a consulting activity. First of all, the council has stated that they do not want for Department Directors to bring in consultants. Moreover, what was presented at the meeting was a boiler plate set of forms that does not meet the threshold of a true consulting service since one of the managing partners, Chris, mentioned that they use the same instruments everywhere. This would indicate that they are vendors selling the same package over and over--not actual consultants who offer very specific and usually case-sensitive solutions to difficult problems.

Green Play presenters identified their documents and groupings as a "process," a "methodology," and a "study," yet they disagreed with me when I and another attendee pointed out that there was terrible bias in the design of the presentation since attendees did not represent a valid survey sample of Encinitas residents. They seemed to do an outreach to people who went to the senior center, yet I only found out about it because I saw an announcement at City Hall. They said that they were interested in studying all of the recreation services the city offered, but the people in the meeting were only a narrow sampling of people who might use recreation services yet did not know about this meeting. Because the outreach was limited to people who were at the City during particular times, most citizens were not aware of these meetings.

The presenters said that their goal was to start "a conversation" and "raise awareness" about issues without creating a reliable way to capture information or to define their terms. They claimed that they were not trying to do valid studies yet identified their information gathering as "a study." I asked them for a list of protocols, and they said that they trained Parks and Recreation staff yet did not have anything in writing. Why is that? One of the hallmarks of actual consulting work is that the rules of how a formal activity like the one I attended is performed need to be written so that others can understand what took place and evaluate the results.

Why does the City continue to hire firms that produce poor results, or no valid results at all as in this case? I find it hard to believe that the council would approve this program with the unhappy history of consultants that we have had in the past.

Below is an article about a sports park that is named as one of Green Play's clients. Please stop wasting our money on this and other recently hired consultants for the Housing Element update. There are ample residents who would DONATE their skills and work collaboratively with staff to design and process valid studies that would not only save money, but would more accurately capture the will of Encinitas citizens. The stated goals and outcomes that the presenters sought in these meetings were not met since they are not measurable or valid.

I am very sorry to say this, but based on what I saw, whatever you paid them was too much. It looks like the city wants to raise fees on residents, and this is the real reason that you have brought these people in.

Sincerely,

Julie Graboi

http://avlne.ws/1tTrQuW

Check the link at the bottom of Graboi's e-mail. Asheville is building a $5.4 million sports park and is planning to fund it by hosting paid-attendance regional sports tournaments and selling beer. Our park cost many tens of millions to build. What's Green Play's plan to pay for that?

And if the city is telling us that the Peak Democracy blog is the only acceptable tool to gather public input for the Housing Element, why wouldn't it be appropriate to use it to collect opinions on park fees?

UPDATE: Green Play's fees to the city for running five very small meetings for a handful of people? $17,503.50.

Blood moon tonight

USA Today:

The second — and final — total lunar eclipse of 2014 will occur early Wednesday morning, just before sunrise in the Eastern Time Zone and in the middle of the night on the West Coast.

The moon will appear a coppery red, so it's been called a "blood" moon. It'll look red because of all the sunsets and sunrises from the Earth that will reflect onto the lunar surface.

[...]

"The eclipse will only be visible in its entirety from parts of eastern Australia, New Zealand, eastern Asia, most of Japan, the Hawaiian Islands and the western part of North America," according to Slooh.com.

Officially, the total eclipse will start at 6:25 a.m. ET (5:25 a.m. CT, 4:25 a.m. MT and 3:25 a.m. PT) and continue until 7:24 a.m. ET (4:24 a.m. PT).

If you're in the central or western parts of the USA, you'll see the total eclipse high in a dark sky well before sunrise, according to Sky and Telescope.