city council district 6 v corona del mar & newport coast
Nancy Gardner
mayor v newport beach, california
newsletter: may 2012
WALK THIS
WAY
Keith Curry introduced the idea of “Meet the Mayor”: announcing a date, time and
place where people could come and chat with him about various issues. I pictured
myself a civic Lucy with my sign, “The Mayor is In,” but that seemed a little
static, and besides, suppose nobody came? So it’ll be “Walk with the Mayor” on
Saturday, May 12, 9 am, leaving from the Oasis Senior Center. The walk will take
about an hour. We will visit two city projects along Buck Gully as well as
traipse Big Corona. Most of it is pretty easy, and where there are climbs, they
are either spurs, meaning you can stay on top and wait for us to come back up,
or at Big Corona you can walk along Ocean Boulevard and meet up with us at
Jasmine. For those who don’t want to walk, we’ll be back at the Oasis around 10
am where we will have light refreshments. The good thing: If nobody comes, I’ll
have a nice walk.
OCEAN
FRIENDLY GARDENS
If you’re interested in having a garden that is both beautiful and efficient but
lack ideas or know how, Surfrider Foundation and G3 have gotten together to make
it easy. G3 puts on lectures and workshops that show how to improve water
retention, soil condition, plant selection and the like to make a garden more
ocean friendly. Surfrider has signs available that identify gardens as ocean
friendly, maps that show where such gardens are, and also a tool kit to achieve
such gardens available online. For more information, go to http://surfrider.org/
and click on Programs; and also http://www.greengardensgroup.com/.
SIGNS (AS
OPPOSED TO OMENS)
Now is the time that our public places are littered with campaign signs. The
city has an ordinance against such signs in public rights of way, an ordinance
that will be completely ignored in the next few months. Campaigns will place
signs in every median they can find. It used to be that city staff would remove
the signs to the General Services yard -- where campaigns would pick them up,
and the process would start over. Now the signs are destroyed, but that will be
barely a deterrent. The funny thing is the biggest expert I know, someone who is
paid major dollars to run major state and national campaigns, says signs are
worthless.
FEE
INCREASES
I will not be
saying anything remarkable when I state that confronting controversy is
something most of us like to avoid, and that includes city councils which means
for years there were no (or extremely minor) increases in fees relating to use
of the tidelands because everyone knew it would be contentious. The problem is
that when there finally is the will to make changes, the changes are significant
because of the previous inaction. This was true of the mooring fields where
there was some definite sticker shock when the new fees were announced. This is
also true of the next round which involves commercial marinas. A council
committee spent the better part of a year researching the issue before coming up
with a proposal. To nobody’s surprise, those affected have not exactly welcomed
the proposed changes with open pocket books, but good dialogue has taken place,
and there have been some revisions as a result. The basic changes suggested are
to switch from annual permits to leases and to change the way rents are
calculated with bigger marinas paying a percentage of gross of slip rentals for
those slips over tidelands. The resulting increase in tideland revenues will
still not cover tideland expenses. The difference is made up from the General
Fund.
GOOD HANDS
When I was in high
school, there were two basic requirements: get good grades and don’t get in
trouble. Other than that, it was up to me how I entertained myself, so I spent
many hours riding my horse and many more hours surfing. How times have changed.
I went to a breakfast the other morning saluting the top academic achievers,
senior class, at Harbor and CdM high schools. They all had dazzling grades and
academic honors. In addition, all of them were involved in sports and, what’s
really impressive, major volunteer activity. We’re not talking the occasional
beach clean up here but significant hours every week with many of them devoting
their summers to things like building orphanages in third-world countries. Sure,
part of this is to bolster the college application, but it’s still impressive,
and it’s hard to believe that kids who have worked so hard for others and been
exposed to so many different experiences won’t be able to come up with some
nifty solutions for the problems they will encounter—many of them thanks to my
horseback riding, beach going non-volunteer generation.
FUTURE TOPIC SUGGESTIONS
This is a two-way process, so please don’t hesitate to contact me with your ideas and opinions. My email address for city business is: NGardner@newportbeachca.gov. Don’t worry if you forget it. I’ll still be using the AOL one, too.
Mayor Nancy Gardner
QUALITY OF LIFE Advocate FOR NEWPORT BEACH
City of Newport Beach | 3300 Newport Blvd | Newport Beach, CA 92663
Phone: 949.644.3004 | EMAIL: ngardner@newportbeachca.gov
Copyright 2012 v Nancy Gardner v All Rights Reserved