Vina out!

Seaside Courier:

Encinitas City Manager Gus Vina has resigned, Seaside Courier learned late Monday. Reliable sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity said Vina informed City Council earlier Monday of his plans to resign.

Vina has been accused of messing up a number of Council requests. Most recently, some Council members, including Councilwoman Lisa Shaffer, said they felt blindsided by his report in September that tax-free bonds could not be used to finance the city’s $10-million purchase of the abandoned Pacific View Elementary School site—driving up the total cost of the deal to more than $20 million over 30 years.

From "Excellent" to out in a year and a half? What changed?

We thought only 28 obstructionists thought Vina was doing a bad job. Does the council owe them an apology?

Hat tip to Jim the Realtor!

Happy 16th Birthday Corie Kook

Al Rodbell reviews Tony Kranz's Housing Element meeting

At Focus on Encinitas:

This is a report on Tony Kranz' meeting last night on this issue at the libray. Tony was honest, beginning by saying he didn't have all the answers. Unfortunately, as his goal was to provide information, his lack of a fundamental understanding of the key issue, whether the "affordable" housing that is the promise of the entire project is real or a fraud, was something he admitted not knowing.

Several members of the audience stated that the planning director Jeff Murphy had said that the chance of these higher density apartments going to the poor* is zero. With any research at all Tony would have discovered this article The Multi-Family Myth, that explains that however the state has defined terms, and then dictated new zoning, they will not increase availability of housing for low income people at all in wealthy cities such as Encinitas.

Tony got caught up by the word "affordable," and said the premise of this law could be true depending on what it means. The word happens to be euphemism for poor, those with little income - yet the actual word is ambiguous by intent. In a free market, which these high density residences will be, everything that is purchased is by definition affordable -that is to those who purchase it such as every multimillion home in Rancho Santa Fe. The term has evolved, along with other euphemisms, under the guise of being kind to those who are destitute without any appreciation how such imprecision of language leads not only an elected city official, but the voters, to be universally confused about a major redefinition of their city. Worse, it allows those developers who are among the wealthy to get richer under the cruel illusion that they are helping the poor. And our friend Tony seems oblivious to this!

Complete Communities is the new Smart Growth

In June, we wrote, "Complete Neighborhoods is the new Smart Growth," as central planners struggled to come up with a catchy marketing phrase for the highly unpopular high-density development they want to force on neighborhoods.

Now the Union-Tribune is on the case.

Some local urban planners and developers, always on the hunt for a new catchphrase, say they have largely failed to tell the public what’s ahead as San Diego enters an increasingly urbanized future.

“It was instructive to me about how we are perhaps not communicating with the average person,” said Joe LaCava, one of the panelists at an Urban Land Institute breakfast Nov. 18, recalling the feeling after one explosive neighborhood meeting earlier this year.

The group toyed with the latest buzzword, “complete communities,” as a new way to communicate what they’re up to. The phrase is meant to entice the public to accept growth by offering a higher quality of life that’s free of congestion, full of housing they can afford and close to shopping, recreation and workplaces.

Previous slogans have apparently fallen flat: smart growth, city of villages, transit-oriented development.

Maybe it's the product, not the marketing?  If we wanted to live in the big city, we would have moved to the big city.

Dueling density meetings open thread

Tony Kranz's meeting on the Housing Element Update and the Olivenhain Town Council meeting were both held last night. Olivenhain had a presentation from Jeff Murphy on the HEU, and residents did not seem receptive.

Encinitas attorney Carl Dimeff sole beneficiary of wealthy elderly client's change of trust

U-T Watchdog:

Four prominent nonprofit charities — UNICEF, the NPR Foundation, Doctors Without Borders and the San Diego Research Foundation — are suing to invalidate a trust [Siv] Ljungwe created in 2008, which left all her money to Encinitas lawyer Carl Dimeff.

The charities contend that Ljungwe was mentally ill when she signed off on the trust, suffering from delusions and infatuated with Dimeff, whom she had met four years earlier by stopping in at his storefront law office.

They say that Ljungwe long wanted her fortune to be distributed to the four charities — each getting an equal 25 percent. Those were the terms under a trust that was set up in 2004 and that the disputed trust of 2008 wiped out.

At the core of the challenge from the charities is a claim that Dimeff cultivated an improper relationship with Ljungwe, capitalizing on her fixations on him and her mental illness to redirect the fortune to him.

Dimeff declined to comment.

Dimeff's office is listed in the old Bank of Dalager building on 101.

Logan Jenkins: "Council members appear to have been snoozing as they rubber-stamped" Ecke YMCA baseball fields contract

Union-Trib:

A raspberry — the Say It Ain’t So award — to both the Magdalena Ecke Family YMCA and the city of Encinitas for quietly poisoning the future of the coastal community’s ancestral baseball fields.

The YMCA and the city appear to be playing mutual moneyball. Now it’s time for youth baseball boosters to play hardball.

In negotiating what was assumed to be a pro forma 10-year extension of a 25-year lease agreement on fields used by Encinitas Little League for more than a half-century, the city bent over, selling out the League and, to compound the damage, not sending up a red flag to say they’d done so. (City Council members appear to have been snoozing as they rubber-stamped the contract.)

One gets the distinct impression that Jenkins is beginning to perceive City Manager Gus Vina as Encinitas council watchers long have: that he manipulates the befuddled council by limiting and distorting (or in this case, glossing over) the information they receive.

Vina has, yet again, quite publicly embarrassed the council and poorly served the public.  Will the council show any backbone in his performance review next month?

UPDATE: It's much worse! The city had the option to renew for 10 years without a termination clause and gave it away without public discussion!