Friday, October 21, 2011

The Samoa Project Ad Hoc Committee Does Their Homework

For the record, the Fresh and Easy exceptions to the FBCSP were unopposed at yesterday's hearing; for those who keep track of such things, this is the oversized signage. That was the only Fresh and Easy item on the agenda. The Fresh and Easy Bill AB 183 was signed into law recently by Governor Brown and Fresh and Easy will have to comply by adding manned checkouts to its design. And while the welcoming committee gladhanded and backpatted at the hearing,  community members juggled countless other responsibilities like diligent and in-depth research on the community opposition to the Samoa Project. The next meeting on this more current hot topic will be held at Sunland Tujunga's North Valley City Hall this coming Monday, October 24th at 7:30 pm at 7747 Foothill Boulevard in Tujunga 91042.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Editorial: Reliable Reporting vs. Reliable Sources

I'm writing this editorial unedited without stopping, straight from the heart... from my keyboard to your eyes (sort of like the expression: 'from your lips to God's ear')...

Dear Sunland Tujunga,
Writers must always remember that there are no  'reliable sources' as all of us are human and falter in our efforts, are clumsy in our helpfulness, and unwittingly interject strong opinion as though it were genuine fact... before passing it on to writers.

Writers have to be so much more responsible than their sources in discernment, checking against known evidence or resources, discounting emotional information, denying themselves 'a story' if there is any doubt or lack of evidence to confirm it. That responsibility is the writers code, and sources (reliable or not) have no responsibility to fact-check their information nor do they bear the responsibility of error if they are wrong. Sources are allowed to talk 'off the cuff' and encouraged to do so. Those unedited conversations should NOT make it into print.

Writers however DO bear responsibility. The spoken word is strong enough but the written word circles the world thanks to the internet. That written word MUST be true. Occasional errors happen and that's what "corrections" are for: to set the record straight. However, if a writer has too many 'corrections' (or none at all) they may not be accurate anymore... that's a fate worse than death for a writer. None of us wants that. For ourselves or each other.

Several inaccuracies have come out in reports concerning key players in the controversial Samoa Project currently in play in Tujunga and Council Chambers. I attended meetings, reported on them and stand by my report. Yet my report differs widely from another's. Those who did not attend the meetings used 'reliable sources' who did.

I have spoken to those sources and the hugeness of the Samoa Project is foremost in their mind; it overshadows reason. Its not that the project isn't huge: in fact it is! But the approach must be step by step. That is my method of reporting vs. others. That is how I viewed the meeting... as a step by step proposal. That's how I approach anything bigger than I am! Step by step...

Now a 'reliable source' suffers needlessly for sharing opinionated information no fact check would have allowed unedited. Meanwhile an inaccurate report goes on record and a Council Office must write to dispute it. You can read the letters here: http://cd2policy.blogspot.com/ The plot thickens... and real issues get shunted aside in favor of misinformation. This is the most alarming result of the situation... residents of Sunland Tujunga lose sight of the issues they CAN have an impact on!

I urge this community. Do not lose focus. Do not speak to issues that are not key to the controversy that is the Samoa Project. Reply only to topics such as: population density, inaccuracies regarding reports of affordable housing in the area, crime and gangs, lack of parking, historical preservation and Bolton Hall, lack of curbs, rainwater flooding, narrow streets, school issues and child safety, fire fighters lack of access, scenic preservation, neighborhood character, lack of greenspace, inadequate parkland, construction pollution... have I given you enough?

I could go on but I'd rather see you at a meeting... please participate. There's nothing like first hand knowledge.

Sincerely,
Brock Ba'jer
Aka Terre Ashmore

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The View from the Cross

The Cross of San Ysidro, Mt. McGroarty, Tujunga
"San Ysidro, Patron Saint of Little Homes, was not a saint of the Catholic Church, according to John McGroarty . . . He was a Spanish peasant, and his name, McGroarty said, indicates he was probably a Jew. . . Thus the dedication of this monument was sponsored by an organization of laymen, held around a cross that was raised in honor of a “saint” who probably was a Jew, and blessed by a Catholic priest during ceremonies involving all Protestant organizations in the Valley.... – Wallace Morgan – for The Record-Ledger

"In selling the idea of it, McGroarty, the Scribe and

Booster Bard, wove the fabled life of San Ysidro – in which

the saint had ceased his work to help the grandam find her goat,

whereupon (in his absence) an angel took those labors up.

A parable in which self-interest was replaced by the

spirit of benevolence – For in the hard life of farming

dry and rocky soil, only with each others help could one survive



"With the convert’s passion, and the spirit of a man reborn

(having thrown the shackles of nocturnal asthma in the sweet

and solemn-breathing air of the Verdugos) the Scribe sold

the broken colony his ecumenical hopes – so much so

they built his cross in weeks, and pledged to find the funds to light it.



"Perhaps by raising it, a monument with manifest ideals,

a people perpetuate such standards. Perhaps not. But

consider this: On the antipodal Verdugos in


J"uly of ‘24, the Times reported on quite different

pageantry beneath a cross – rather, several – burning as

eight hundred on the Glendale hills joined that city’s Ku Klux Klan.

Or this: that when ‘30s Tujunga Jewry formed their Temple

Shomrei Emunah, Guardians of the Faith, the Women’s Club gave

them a home, five years, while they built. This while La Crescenta’s

chapter of the Bund held pro-Nazi rallies at their parks, and

Pasadena practiced covenants excluding Jews and papists.



"Four months, and they had lit the cross – and in a time when night pulled

a drape of perfect darkness on the hills, the Cross was more than

cross, but spoke of noble-minded roots, what they valued in others

and hoped for from themselves. And perhaps in those black nights, its light

was consolation for their failed Utopian dream, broken

by the harshness of life in a place known as the Rock."
 – Wallace Morgan – for The Record-Ledger


To all of us who live in this beloved valley, who, cut off from the rest of our far-flung City, must rely on each other for safety and even for continued health as we seek to safeguard the historic quality of the air that sustains us* -- I wish us the peace that surpasseth understanding. The founders of this community, the Little Lands Colony, a socialist-utopian agricultural colony, relied on the good will of others to an extent we rarely see today. But I believe, with them for inspiration, that we can live in tolerance of each other, and protect this beautiful land, as those who came before us did: our historical society, founded by the community in the mid-50s, who told the City they would not allow the City's planned destruction of Bolton Hall -- now a treasured landmark honored as a National Landmark, State Point of Historic Interest and City Historic Monument -- and in so doing created Los Angeles' Historic Preservation ordinance, which now protects over 1,000 cultural or historic landmarks; community activists in the '80s and '90s who demanded that the City stop sending the urban blight of auto wrecking yards to our town, and insisted that our hills and mountains be off limits to developers, along the way creating the Scenic Corridor and Foothill Blvd. Specific Plans; and the community activists of this 21st century who for four years said no to the City and one of the most devious, conniving and well-funded of America's commercial giants, and in beating Home Depot lent encouragement to communities all over the nation who have gone on to successfully fight off the incursion of big box stores and their slash-and-burn economic models.

We face a new threat today. The City has fast-tracked a publicly funded 5-floor monster of a Housing Project on Samoa Avenue at Valmont, an area already suffering from its occupation by the notorious Toonerville gang (according to the Los Angeles Times, Daily News and the LAPD). According to the LAPD's website (lapdonline.org), one Toonerville Tujunga banger is among their top ten most wanted gang members, Top Ten, first wanted for the murder of a Tujungan on Valmont, two blocks from the proposed Projects. And the City's idea of how to help us rid ourselves of the scourge of gang violence and crime is to obliterate more of our one-storey historic community and stuff 64-units, all but three of them three- to four-bedrooms, onto a twenty-foot wide street on land once occupied by two two-bedroom 900 square-foot houses. High density housing projects have been denounced by all other western nations as an absolute failure in providing decent affordable housing, serving instead to promote crime, pollution, asthma and a perpetuation of hopelessness. Another boondoggle for billionaire developers and a stab at the hopes of low- to moderate-income asthmatics with the hope of being able to breathe in a home of their own.

Thank you for all you do to make this place so wonderful.



Kathleen Travers


Kathleen, a former educator, is a 4th-generation Angeleno. An art historian who specializes in historic restoration, she lives in a 1924 bungalow farmhouse in Sunland that she restored. She reads her poetry with the Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga, who present their readings on the fourth Sunday of each month, 4:30 p.m., at Bolton Hall Museum, 11000 Commerce Avenue.


* Sunland-Tujunga was a haven for those with asthma from its inception. Once known as one of two places in the world with the perfect air quality for healing respiratory ailments (the other in the Nile River Delta, Egypt), asthmatics moved here from all over the world to be healed, and stayed. Even now, surveys reveal that half of all households in our community house an asthmatic, many of them maintained by our life-giving air alone, without medication. But new construction with the release of toxins from teardowns, from the disturbed soil and from the highly toxic building materials now used, along with increased vehicle traffic, threaten to destroy the fragile balance of our perfect air, cleaned by our surrounding hillsides, our native trees, the directional orientation of our valley and the wind patterns whipped by the many canyons of our favorite high wind zone.

What does AB 183 mean for consumers and Fresh & Easy?

What does the passage of AB 183 mean to customers of Fresh & Easy, the British chain of supermarkets taking over California? Simply put? More service and more jobs! F&E will have to hire more employees to cashier at the legally required manned checkouts needed to purchase alcohol. Californians will have more service and more jobs and the potential for alcohol abuse will be reduced as well.

F&E has worked very hard to create the image in the consumers mind that self serve cash registers are somehow preferable. The one who benefits most from self serve anything is the business who forces the consumer to do for free what the business once had to pay an employee to do for them. Consumers don’t realize the price of goods includes the expense of selling them to the consumer. When the service disappears entirely but the goods only go down in price moderately, who profits? Not the consumer.

The one who benefits most from self serve anything is the business who forces the consumer to do for free what the business once had to pay an employee to do for them.
Studies show customers prefer to use manned checkout stands. Given a choice (which Fresh & Easy does not) the customer will go to the cashier and bagger, not the self serve register. (At Albertsons lines often stretch from manned registers while self serve registers are unused.) Fresh & Easy will need to provide more cashiers to serve those waiting in line and you can see F&E’s bottom dollar shrink in profits vs. overhead. No wonder they fought AB 183

Opponents have staged elaborate scenarios where they tried to purchase alcohol from a self serve register and photograph the act then when they were caught (as if their suspicious behavior weren’t a red flag) they report the system works. It does not. Intoxicated adults have used the self serve registers without effort and teen sites detail how to overwhelm the self serve register to their advantage. Nothing compares to a human being looking them in the eye and asking for ID.

Besides, after all the work it takes to make a cartful of purchases I want the few moments to catch my breath at the register while a cashiers expertise and a baggers skill rewards me as a consumer for choosing a full serve market.  

The people of the State of California do enact as follows:

Assembly Bill No. 183
CHAPTER 726
An act to add Section 23394.7 to the Business and Professions Code,
relating to alcoholic beverages.

[Approved by Governor October 9, 2011. Filed with
Secretary of State October 9, 2011.]

Legislative Counsel’s Digest
AB 183, Ma. Alcoholic beverage licenses: self-service checkouts.

The Alcoholic Beverage Control Act, administered by the Department
of Alcoholic Beverage Control, regulates the sale and distribution of
alcoholic beverages and the granting of licenses for the manufacture,
distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages within the state.

This bill would prohibit off-sale licensees from selling alcoholic beverages
using a customer-operated checkout stand located on the licensee’s physical
premises. This bill makes findings and declarations regarding the effects of
allowing alcoholic beverages to be sold using self-service checkouts.

The Alcoholic Beverage Control Act provides that a violation of any of
its provisions for which another penalty or punishment is not specifically
provided is a misdemeanor. This bill would expand existing crimes by
imposing additional duties on a licensee under the act, thus, the bill would
impose a state-mandated local program.

The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies
and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory
provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement.
This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this act for
a specified reason.

The people of the State of California do enact as follows:
SECTION 1. The Legislature finds and declares that allowing customers
to purchase alcoholic beverages through self-service checkouts:
(a) Facilitates the purchase of alcoholic beverages by minors.
(b) Permits customers who are in an advanced state of intoxication to
purchase additional alcoholic beverages, in violation of state law.
(c) Allows for greater theft of alcoholic beverages, thereby depriving the
state of tax revenues.

SEC. 2. Section 23394.7 is added to the Business and Professions Code,
to read: 23394.7. No privileges under an off-sale license shall be exercised by
the licensee at any customer-operated checkout stand located on the
licensee’s physical premises.

SEC. 3. No reimbursement is required by this act pursuant to Section 6
of Article XIII B of the California Constitution because the only costs that
may be incurred by a local agency or school district will be incurred because
this act creates a new crime or infraction, eliminates a crime or infraction,
or changes the penalty for a crime or infraction, within the meaning of
Section 17556 of the Government Code, or changes the definition of a crime
within the meaning of Section 6 of Article XIII B of the California
Constitution.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

A Story: The Canyon Is A Magic Place

There’s something magic about The Canyon.
No, really: I saw it with my own eyes…or did I?
It happened about 15 years ago…or did it?

As a single parent I always found ways to entertain my son that were free, inexpensive and local. As an environmental enthusiast and Big T “local” it was a perfect setting to take my growing son every week of his young life to Big Tujunga Canyon (The Canyon for short). We hiked, gathered natural ‘treasures’, swam in the pools and waterfalls and loved The Canyon like it was our own back yard. But we never saw anything in our yard to equal what we witnessed in The Canyon.

There’s an outcrop of rock just past the intersection of Big T Canyon Road and The 2 Highway, before the dam overlook. We always called it The Flattop. It had a forest rangers station at one time, years ago. It stretches a rocky peninsula of stone way out into The Canyon’s natural crevasse. One of The Canyon’s purging fires wiped the station out and all that remains is the concrete foundation, stone planters and a series of flat levels that were bunkers, a helicopter pad and unpaved parking in better days; a deeply rutted road wends its way up to the top of the precipice. Winding and treacherous trails snake in broken pathways down the cliffsides and end in concrete outlooks. It is a glorious place to explore! My son Adam and I discovered that helicopter student pilots learn to fly up The Canyon, hover over Flattop and often land there. Perfect for a young boy to see!

So one weekday afternoon we packed a lunch and set out for Flattop. I nearly chose another destination for variety as we had just been there the day before…We parked in the little turnout across the road from Flattop. From the moment we got out of the car I knew something was different. It was so quiet it was like the sound had been turned off and all the natural things: birds chittering, winds sighing, ground squirrels scampering in the underbrush, were utterly absent. Silence loomed like a physical presence. I shook it off as my imagination and we hiked up the road to Flattop.

At the very first level I had planned to stop and cut ancient rosemary to weave into a wreath for my kitchen. I had my clippers at the ready but when we came to the flat area that stretched like an optical illusion into a sheer drop off, I crouched instinctively with clippers held like a weapon before me and drew my child behind me for protection…

Before me was an intricate Celtic Circle: a series of concentric circular pathways that covered the entire (every square foot) rocky shelf for a diameter of about 3500 square feet! It was made of hundreds of river stones, each the same smooth texture and the sizes grew progressively and minutely smaller as they marched inward. They had to have been brought to the site as all the stones on the precipice are angular not smooth. The pathway led ever inward to the center where a small barren tree had been planted and little objects hung from its branches. The entire Flattop had been swept smooth where the Celtic Circle was. Without thinking I began to walk the pathway, then caught myself and stopped in amazement at what I beheld and my acceptance of it; but that wasn’t all...

It felt as though we were being watched, like we’d surprised someone walking the circle and I imagined they had scurried for cover in the underbrush or might be hiding on the cliffside trails. As I cast my eyes about me looking for anything else not ‘right’, my gaze came to a complete shocked halt at an impossible sight (more so even than anything I had beheld so far).

There on the very point of the precipice was an immense and perfectly detailed 20 foot tall Wicker Man! As a person of UK heritage (and a nice mix of it) I can say my affinity for all things of that faraway land appeal to me in a deeply satisfying way… but this creation made my skin prickle and every hair stand up. It was shockingly ugly. It was both male and female with long branches of hair and skeletal limbs and enormous hollow abdomen. I believe it was not a good thing, yet how can I call such a mystery: evil? It was made entirely of branches; mud held it together and formed genitalia (both sexes) and it pointed one long arm with the index finger extended like a knobby hand down toward The Canyon in the direction I had come and directly in line with the setting sun. It was plainly spiritual and none of this had been there when we were, just the day before. 

Then, as only small boys can do, my son marched over to the circle, and before I realized what he was doing, he pried a stone from its place and flung it out over the cliff. I never heard it hit for the instant he threw it, it seemed as though a door had opened and all the sound that had been stored there came at me at once! It was a cacophony of noise: birds, winds, falling rocks and something else I cannot say… but very like a voice. I'd like to say I searched for it on the hillside but in truth our bodies moved of their own accord!

Our feet only touched the ground to take off and it seemed we made it back to the car in one long stride. Neither of us spoke all the drive home but when I got there my son said “no one will believe us” so I ran inside the house for the camera and he was still in shock in the car when I returned. We drove all the way back up to Flattop in record time.

It was gone. No… it was like it had never been. Even in the deepening dusk I could see every single stone was gone, not piled to the side but entirely absent. Not a twig or bit of mud remained of the Wicker Man and it was not thrown over the precipice. The tree was gone and every thing on it. The area had bits of debris natural to the setting strewn back in place. But our footprints from our earlier visit were also gone…

There was nothing to take a picture of.
Only our memory of the day remains…
The Canyon is a magic place.



Terre Ashmore © 2011


Thursday, October 6, 2011

Editorial: " Uh-oh! Your Name Is On Their Blah'g..."

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Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah; blah blah blah blah… BLAH!