July- a summer month full of care free fun and vacations. But not this year. I’m glad I haven’t done the daily brief this summer because this month would have been pretty depressing if you follow Santa Clarita news.
Where to start?
Well this month two motor vehicle-cycling accidents had me quite upset. The first, on July 3, involved a motorist who hit a bicyclist named Kevin Mather on Sierra Highway. He suffered spinal injuries and is still recovering in the hospital.
Just eight days later, a 43 year old cyclist named Joe Novotny of Stevenson Ranch was allegedly hit and killed by a 20 year old, two-time DUI offender named Marco Valencia. Valencia, it appears, was under the influence at about 10am on a Saturday morning and was driving erratically northbound on Bouquet when he hit a group of Santa Clarita Velo cyclists travelling southbound. The authorities quickly caught Valencia and just today he entered a “Not Guilty” plea in San Fernando court. All the cyclists I’ve talked to in the last few weeks were shaken up by this incident because it could have happened to any one of us.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, we also had an odd murder-suicide this month. Forty-seven year old Giuliana Perrotta of Canyon Country was found beaten to death; her 51 year old husband, the killer, was later found to have hung himself in the backyard.
Just a few days later, on Saturday July 18, an airplane carrying two men crashed in the Sand Canyon area, killing them both.
Even odder, on Monday, a 32 year old woman was found dead in a Mercedes in front of a day care center on Hasley Canyon Road in Castaic. Cops don’t think the death is suspicious, but, what the heck? How does someone just end up in a car dead?
By now this post is becoming pretty morbid, so let’s turn our attention to another depressing local issue: funding from the state. This is the month where Sacramento’s budget problems were made evident in the SCV.
Yesterday we learned that the SCV Domestic Violence Center, which helped 1,000 women and children last year with an emergency shelter and a hotline, will have its funding slashed by several hundred thousand dollars and will likely have to close by the end of the year. That follows news that funds to help home-bound seniors have also been slashed, leading the SCV Senior Center’s Brad Berens to say, “I expect this to be pretty devastating for us.”
Yep- July is the month where the most vulnerable among us really got the shaft from the state.
Speaking of funding, if you were thinking of going back to COC to expand your skills or retrain after a layoff, you can look forward to a 30% hike in per-unit charges. Last semester a unit cost $20; now the college has raised that to $26, so if you take a full 12 units in the fall semester, look forward to paying $312 rather than $240. It could have been worse; the Legislative Analysts Office recommended raising community college fees to $60 per unit!
CSUN, however, is worse. Their rates have shot up even more. A friend of mine is paying $1200 more to go to CSUN this semester than last semester. Good thing she has a job, errr wait, does she?
Today the Los Angeles Economic Development Council released its mid-year economic forecast, and it’s predictions for the SCV aren’t pretty. We all knew those office (25.3% vacancy rate) and retail vacancies around town couldn’t be good for job opportunities in Santa Clarita, and now we can put a number on that. The LAEDC says Santa Clarita’s employment rate dropped 1.2% in 2008, and we can expect it to decline a full 6.0% (6,000 jobs) more in 2009-2010, among the biggest declines in the region. By then, the report says, 79,000 jobs will be in the SCV, compared with a high of over 82,000 jobs in 2007.
So with all these challenges, what’s the City of Santa Clarita doing? Well, we don’t know enough yet to understand how the state budget cuts will affect the City’s funding (we have some idea, they’ve already made cuts, but are more coming?). This month they fully deployed the Think SCV campaign and received praise for their 21-point economic plan, but restaurants are still closing all around town (China Palace and Nick ‘n Willy’s apparently the latest victims). I was looking forward to a renewed, data-intensive debate about annexation/incorporation of the West Side and Castaic communities, but the Signal and the community have thrown a cold, wet towel over the two reports that were supposed to inform the partisans on each side of I5.
Don’t get me wrong, there was some good news this month but it was all overshadowed by the stories above. The SCV Misery Index may be at an all time high, the recession having finally caught up with us, but here’s hoping August improves!