Since 1957 a vote of the people has decided who would be the Huntington Beach City Attorney. Since 1978 no incumbent holding that office has lost an election. Gail Hutton, who defeated incumbent city attorney Don Bonfa in the city election that year, easily remained in office until her retirement 24 years later in 2002.
Her replacement, Jennifer McGrath, was elected to the office next with 48.2 percent of the vote in a race against three opponents, but she ran unopposed in her 2006 reelection campaign.
Next November she will have one opponent listed on the ballot, T. Gabe Houston, who officially signed his candidate’s papers at the City Clerk’s office on Aug. 6, the last day to file.
Like other City Attorney challengers, Houston may also end up as election fodder. But his late entry reveals a serious flaw in the Huntington Beach City Charter—despite nine months of work by the City’s Charter Review Commission that recommend reforms—and exposes the hidden attempts (and not so hidden attempts) by various members of the Huntington Beach City Council to gain political power by manipulating the reform process for better or worse.
Previously, the Voice showed how the council’s backroom political dramas have come to center stage at city council meetings. But recent e-mails obtained by the Voice give a sharper picture of the passion and acrimony flowing through the political veins of the city.
Americans have been led to believe that they can’t make a significant difference in much of anything once corporate and governmental interests are involved. Big oil and big automakers have historically counted on the false belief that we as American citizens cannot impact our transportation future. Plug In America, www.pluginamerica.org, a non-profit coalition of plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) advocates, proves just how incorrect that assumption actually is.
Photo courtesy Linda Nicholes
PIA was born in 2005 when a grass-roots gathering of actual and hopeful electric vehicle drivers came together in an attempt to halt the destruction of approximately 5,000 production electric vehicles as portrayed in the film documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? PIA actually managed to save 1,000 zero emission vehicles from the crusher, most of which remain on the road today. Since that time, PIA has metaphorically zoomed from zero to 60 in record time, evolving from a grassroots group to a well-respected, game-changing organization with 23,000 supporters. Today PIA helps shape corporate and legislative automotive policy. We demonstrate that when average Americans join forces to influence vested power and vested interests, the results can be truly electrifying. Continue Reading
Joe Shaw announced his candidacy for the Huntington Beach City Council on Oct. 24, 2009 at the home of former mayor and city council member Debbie Cook. The OC Voice was there to record the event, joining a house full of supporters, including another former mayor/council member, Connie Boardman, League of Conservation Voters representative, Gus Ayer, HB city planning commissioner Blair Farley, who is also running for city council (with Shaw’s endorsement, and others. Shaw has lived in the city a relatively short time but wasted no time in getting involved in the thick of the city’s most important issues, starting as a founding member of the Downtown Business District and providing the initial idea and inspiration for Surf City Nights, a Tuesday event (4-9 p.m.) that closes off downtown to auto traffic and offers a farmers market and a wide variety of street entertainers, a welcome change for HB residents who have avoided the beer mall atmosphere, complete with bull-riding, barfing drunks, brawling drunks, urinating drunks, and drunks who drive recklessly at high speeds through nearby residential areas (including, in full disclosure, right outside of this writer’s home on many occasions) that occurs generally after 9 p.m. every night, especially on weekends and during the summer. Shaw has also been an on (when not campaigning) and off-again columnist for the OC Voice. He also served as a city planning commissioner and currently serves on the city’s charter review committee. More information is available on his campaign website at: http://joeshawforhb.com/joeshawforhb/Issues.html
Note: This article was originally published in the OC Voice Oct. 2007 print edition. It is reprinted here because it relates to Joe Shaw’s column about the banning of street signs by the Huntington Beach City Council. His column focused on the economic consequences, this article focuses on the related constitutional issues at they played out in the city of Costa Mesa. Also read Shaw’s column here.
Costa Mesa day laborers looking for work on street corners at two separate locations in the city, Placentia Avenue and 17th Street, and Placentia Avenue and Victoria Street, say that city police are routinely harassing them and making it difficult for them to find employment.
Almost without exception, workers at both corners who were interviewed by the OC Voice on three separate occasions during September claimed that police routinely—from once in a while to several times a week—approached them while they were standing on sidewalks or in parking lots and told them, sometimes without giving a reason, that they had to leave the area, sometimes threatening them with tickets or even arrest if they returned.
Costa Mesa Chief of Police Christopher Shawkey says that his officers are only enforcing a city ordinance that prohibits anyone from soliciting employment, commercial, or charitable transactions on public streets in a manner that distracts motorists and creates a potential safety hazard, and that prohibits the same types of solicitation in private parking lots where the owners have posted signs banning those activities. Continue Reading
Poseidon Resources Inc.’s website claims that the desalination plant it wants to build in southeast Huntington Beach, at Newland and Beach avenues, will be a “cost-effective solution to provide residents with a safe and reliable water supply by using existing structures—at no cost to taxpayers.”
NOT THE VIRGIN MARY: The OC Voice took this photo of the city's new seal and later noticed the mysterious man in the background.
Elected officials who voted to approve the desalination plant three years ago have consistently echoed Poseidon’s claim: Poseidon would privately own and operate the plant for its own profit and for its investors—a strictly free market affair with no taxpayer investment or risk, they said.
City council representative Don Hansen praised the project’s supposed free market values to a crowded city council chamber before he gave Poseidon his vote along with three other council members, Keith Bohr, Gil Coerper and Cathy Green.
“My belief is that the market is going to drive the majority of these decisions. I truly believe that,” Hansen said.
If the Poseidon desalination plant is not profitable, he added, it “will never see the light of day. And it’s purely born on private investment dollars, the risk that they [Poseidon] are going to take.”
In a candidates’ debate last year, Hansen warned that “We’re going to need the water” and reassured again that “It’s not us building the plant. It’s all private investment.”
If all goes well for Poseidon, its Huntington Beach plant will produce 50 million gallons of drinking water per day by sometime in 2011. It still needs to obtain additional government permits and must work out a franchise agreement with the city first.
Poseidon plans to build an almost identical desalination plant in the city of Carlsbad. That project is further along in the permit process and if financing comes through it could start construction this summer. Poseidon’s CEOs dream of building large desalination plants at other California coastal locations as well.
Hansen’s appeal to the free market instincts of the voters is persuasive in a city where the call for smaller government is almost a religious doctrine. But attributing either Poseidon project to to free-market karma is misleading because the company could benefit from as much as $1 billion in taxpayer supplied subsidies that would make it easier for Poseidon to attract the private sector financing that it also needs but still lacks in order to build and operate the two plants. Continue Reading
By Joe Shaw
OC Voice Columnist
(This column was written in February, 2009)
California lost 600,000 jobs in January. The jobless rate in California is now 9.3 percent. Huntington Beach’s Quiksilver recently announced 150 layoffs in their workforce. Boeing laid off 64 local workers. Home Depot’s Expo Design Center and Circuit City is closing, leaving more workers without a job.
And Huntington Beach home sales remain down and foreclosures continue to edge up.
Perfect time for the HB City Council to create some jobs and help our small businesses, right? Wrong. A move by planning commissioners to remove a ban on human signs was rejected by the city council 5-2.
Why wouldn’t the council vote to lift one of the many rules and regulations that frustrate small business and cost them money? Why wouldn’t our city council support free trade, small business and creating jobs?
Councilman Don Hansen told the Los Angeles Times the signs were a “form of visual blight.”
Sounds like hypocrisy from the councilman who just named a realtor as his new planning commissioner. Ever driven around Huntington Beach on the weekends and seen all the real estate signs on every corner? Continue Reading
ORIGINAL OWNERS: Charles Letterman and wife, Allie, with their two children, Gladys and Claude, standing in front of their downtown Huntington Beach home about 1901. Photo: Courtesy Susan Worthy
SUSAN WORTHY and her husband, Guy Guzardo, had been trying for decades to save and restore their small two-story, eastern-style, cottage and its accompanying large commercial building, both located at the corner of 6th and Walnut streets in downtown Huntington Beach. After years of fighting redevelopment politics and searching for funding, they began a full restoration of the two buildings about a year ago.
H.B. residents might appreciate their perseverance because the structures are extraordinary and vital to understanding the city’s history. The 1200 square foot house and the 5,000 square foot commercial building date prior to 1904, the year that electricity first came to the city and it officially took the name Huntington Beach.
Both buildings are in the National Register of Historical Places because they retain their original materials and structure (the Newland home is the city’s only other un-remodeled historical structure) and due to their direct connection to two of the city’s founding settlers-Matthew and Mollie Helme, Susan’s great grandparents.
“There’s nothing that looks like it in all of southern California,” Worthy says. Although small, the home started out with four bedrooms and an outside bathroom. In 1907 walls were knocked down to create two bedrooms. Today, one of those rooms is the bathroom, leaving only one bedroom. Continue Reading
For the nine in ten Americans who know next to nothing about nanotechnology (NT), there is little time to waste in getting up to speed because, ready or not, the NT revolution is well underway with new nano-engineered consumer products entering the market weekly.
Multi-walled carbon nanotubes exhibit unique properties. Photo courtesy of PEN.
Another reason, as voiced by consumer protection, health, and environmental organizations, is that NT products are being sold without adequate safety testing and government oversight.
The actual number of NT products in commerce is unknown because there is no labeling or reporting requirement, but over 800 have been tabulated by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN), an online inventory of manufacturer-identified NT goods funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
In 2007, at least $147 billion in global manufactured goods incorporated NT, encompassing such varied products as cosmetics, clothing, food, food packaging, and dietary supplements. PEN estimates that figure will reach $2.6 trillion by 2014. Continue Reading
It’s not much of a stretch to liken America’s relationship with cells phones to a once sizzling romance that ends in good bye.
Given all the environmental costs of cell phones, certainly the most eco-friendly cell is the one you already own.
Fated love affairs typically begin with blind infatuation and fiery passion before reality sets in, cooling the embers enough to allow more guarded, sometimes less attractive aspects of the self to surface. Interest wanes until the love object is abandoned or replaced by an alluring new one.
Americans relate to cell phones in much the same way. An old phone, with once novel features that drew fascination, is discarded with hardly a thought when an updated model makes it seem obsolete.
That consumers replace cell phones about every two years–with Californians purchasing in a single year nearly one new cell for every two state residents–makes this analogy seem less silly.
A parallel can be drawn too between the innards of a cell phone and what is revealed when one person lets another peek inside: it’s not all pretty. Some nasty materials lurk behind the bright shiny casing, making cell phone disposal a knotty environmental issue, analogous to ending, with minimal damages, a relationship gone sour. Continue Reading
