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April 5, 2010· scvtalk.com · WordPress (SCVTalk 3.0) · Wayback capture

April 5, 2010 – Daily Brief

By Jeff — Jeff Wilson

  • Candidates Gauny & Boydston expose Citizens for Integrity in Government as a PAC representing only one company, our old pals G&L Realty, the Beverly Hills-based developer of Henry Mayo’s campus expansion. Boydston and Gauny say G&L have failed to register with the City of Santa Clarita Clerk, as required by law. CIG has been behind a number of mailers supporting incumbents McLean, Weste and Ferry. For their part, Weste and McLean note they have no control over what G&L does with its money. SIGNAL, WRB #1, WRB #2
  • Whittaker-Bermite perchlorate cleanup is taking much longer than expected, and there is concern that the insurance policy funding the cleanup could expire before all the work is done according to the SIGNAL
  • 20 million people felt yesterday’s powerful 7.2 earthquake centered in Baja Mexico, says Cal Tech. Aftershocks are likely to continue. The quake, which is the strongest in the region in about 20 years, was felt pretty strongly here in Santa Clarita as well. LA TIMES, KHTS
  • LA County and Santa Clarita officials to meet this week on annexation of Hasley Hills, Live Oak, North Bluff neighborhoods. Says Brian Roney, an HH resident, “It’s been a long time coming.” SIGNAL
  • The Santa Clarita Century bike ride went off without a hitch and we had great turnout and weather. At least 300 people registered to ride in the 6 mile long family fun ride, the 25 mile out to Canyon Country and back ride, the 58 mile ride to Acton and a 100 mile ride to Palmdale and back. And a local cyclist name Tom Bolewski who was injured in a motorcycling accident a few years ago climbed aboard a tandem bike and completed a ride. Westfield turns out to be a great place to host an event like this SIGNAL. Congrats to Santa Clarita Velo!
  • Other school districts in the area don’t pay for eighth grade promotion ceremonies, instead they depend on parental groups to fund the ceremonies and on students to set up chairs and such, according to the SIGNAL. Hart says it spends $40,000 a year on promotion ceremonies, an amount a local teacher finds “absurd“
  • A Sacramento judge has ruled that State Senator George Runner’s designation of himself as a “Taxpayer Advocate/Senator” on the November ballot is legal. Runner is running for state Tax Board of Equalization and his opponents had charged that the designation was, well, a little embellished. But the SacBee isn’t buying it, saying that it’s time to stop silly job titles on ballots
  • State Democrats spent $11,620 and Republicans spent $2,695 on Amazon.com in 2009. That and more odd spending habits in this PRESS ENTERPRISE REPORT
  • Congressman Buck McKeon doesn’t know how to, or simply doesn’t, use his cell phone to send text messages. That according to his spokeswoman Lindsey Mask who got queried by a Kansas City website about McKeon’s appearance on a Capitol balcony during which he egged on Tea Partiers at the height of the health care reform drama KC WEBSITE
  • Grandson of one of the original Ventura County ranchers recalls the splendor and hard work of the Santa Clara river valley and the fact that in Santa Clarita, Ventura County farmers would “take their sheep to pasture in the alfalfa fields in the winter, and would bale the alfalfa into hay come summer” in the Magic Mountain area. VeCo STAR
  • Saugus High to create anonymous tip (bully snitch?) boxes and organize a field trip to the Museum of Tolerance in wake of one student scratching a swastika in the palm of another. SIGNAL
  • Dave Bossert says the Hart District should stop wasting time and should get busy building Castaic High on the Romero Canyon site. WRB
  • Tim Myers rightly points out that this election season has been one of complaint, vitriol, and negativity. And yet…I’m voting for the challengers. SIGNAL
  • Steve Lunetta, Signal columnist, endorses incumbents in conversation with his uncle, then says SCV residents should vote their conscience. Also he takes a dig at “moronic bike lines.” SIGNAL
  • LaRouchites spotted at the Canyon Country post office complete with Obama-as-Hitler posters LTE
  • He’s practically the SCV’s Pater Familias (or at least he’s related to our pater familias) and Tony Newhall says Boydston and Gauny are a “breath of fresh air” in comparison with the current incumbents LTE

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Comments (14)

  1. Spineflower2April 5, 2010 at 8:45 am
    The excuse that the incumbents “can’t control what donors do” is nothing less than a self-admission of their lack of LEADERSHIP ability. If they can’t lead their own supporters, how can they lead the rest of the SCV? Lame. Something “cancerous” about a PAC of CIGs.
  2. CoastalSageApril 5, 2010 at 1:55 pm
    A little tip on this issue of cooperation by candidates in mailings by independent expenditure committees. Look to see if the same photographs of the candidates are used. Marsha McLean was stupid enough to allow the her same canned photo to be used on her own mailers and on “independent expenditure committee” mailers on her behalf during the first Council election she won.
  3. John QApril 5, 2010 at 9:31 am
    Do the people of Santa Clarita care if their City Council is for sale? Throw the incumbent bums out. If their votes are for sale, and from the looks of the majority of their donors it looks like they are, then they don’t deserve to be in there. We don’t need City Councilmembers for life. We have City staff for life. Different roles, and they should be different terms.
  4. Silence DogoodApril 5, 2010 at 12:06 pm
    These Santa Clarita City Council incumbents have been shaking down local businesses for campaign contributions. Frank Ferry’s email stated that fact boldly enough. Isn’t there some kind of law against that? If not, there should be! That is corruption of the highest order, and should not be tolerated by any citizen/voter in Santa Clarita! I read the lame excuses from the incumbents in yesterday’s Signal over this CIG PAC funding of the slick mailers for the incumbents. Turns out that the head of that PAC used to be the campaign manager for one of Frank Ferry’s political campaigns. And the incumbents now say they have no knowledge of or coordination with this Citizens for Integrity in Government PAC??? Do the incumbents think we are stupid? I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night!! They have been in long enough. Time to get these Incumbents OUT! VOTE for all new people in… The best I see are David Gauny, TimBen Boydston, and Henry Schultz.
  5. PubliusApril 5, 2010 at 9:32 am
    George is a good guy and I’ll vote for him, but let’s face it, he didn’t become a “TaxpayerAdvocate” until he decided to run for the Bd. of Equalization. “A Sacramento judge has ruled that State Senator George Runner’s designation of himself as a “Taxpayer Advocate/Senator” on the November ballot is legal.”
  6. Love Santa ClaritaApril 5, 2010 at 12:51 pm
    My second day joining in and am not sure if my comments yesterday got lost in the large number of responses before it. My issue with David is Hypocrisy. He has a press conference attacking there was not a report filed with the City, but he knows the details because it was filed with the County. On the other hand, he gets an Independent Expenditure from the Right Wing CRA with money from Larry Rasmussen and his friends. He says he doesn’t know the details, but sends us to the fppc web site where the details are in black and white. Now today I get a SECOND mailer from this CRA group. Who funded this? Where is their report? Enough is enough David
  7. RockyApril 5, 2010 at 2:57 pm
    The CRA is the California Republican Assembly was described by President Reagan as “the conscience of the Republican Party.” Their beliefs are at http://www.californiarepublicanassembly.com/content/what-we-believe They are hardly a far right group, and in fact probably are at or near the political center in Santa Clarita. It really is a grassroots organization that is very much in touch with most Republicans. The local group voted to give David Gauny its endorsement. While TimBen Boydston garnered a majority of CRA votes, a 2/3 super-majority was required for endorsement. The incumbents McLean, Ferry, and Weste all trailed these two top vote earners by embarrassing margins. Today I received a mailer sent by the CIG PAC saying that the Republican Party of Los Angeles has endorsed all three incumbents. This elite establishment group of party insiders have shown once again how out of touch they are with the people of Santa Clarita. Shame on them, and this corrupt CIG /G&L Realty axis, that wants to buy this City Council election. NO VOTES FOR INCUMBENTS! (pass it on!) By contr
  8. CoastalSageApril 5, 2010 at 1:49 pm
    In light of yesterday’s earthquake, I want to point out that there’s a very cool newer website organizing layman level information on major destructive faults in Southern California: http://www.data.scec.org/index.html The two faults involved in yesterday’s huge earthquake are “little studied”. A look at the tab called “Recent Earthquakes in California and Nevada” shows the wide dispersion of seismic energy, in significant quantities, across a broad spectrum of faults which surface maps don’t show being connected. In fact, before the map of yesterday’s earthquake got blurred by all of the aftershock boxes, one could see that the epicenter of the big shock was on the Cerro Prieto Fault in Mexico, but the seismic energy jumped westward into the Laguna Salada Fault which shoots northwards up into the bottom of California. The name “Laguna Salada Fault” is simply a politically motivated re-naming of the bottom of the “Elsinore Fault Zone” which touches the “Whittier Fault” heading right into L.A. The Elsinore Fault Zone is also a fault which moves symbiotically with the San Andreas fault. They are generally parallel and both subject to the same force from the Pacific Plate subducting and jamming under the North American Plate. This morning, on CNN, the Los Angeles area head of the U.S. Geologic Survey publicly admitted what all seismology students in California know…that the much feared “San Andreas Fault is in reality a “San Andreas Fault Zone” with multiple parallel fault traces, and major symbiotic parallel faults like the Elsinore Fault and the Hayward Fault. Santa Clarita’s own San Gabriel Fault is part of the “old route” of the San Andreas Fault which became locked when the oceanic plate chunk now forming the San Gabriel Mountains dove into the San Gabriel fault trench and jammed it shut millions of years ago. There is so much stress on the San Andreas Fault’s “big bend” around the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area in large part because the previously smooth flowing seismic waves in that fault must now go around the bend. That is why seismologists keep predicting 95+% probability of a huge 7 to 8 earthquake on “our” part of the San Andreas fault in the next 35 years. Nobody has figured out whether a major earthquake on the San Andreas big bend will, in turn, trigger the unlocking of a huge symbiotic earthquake on Santa Clarita’s own San Gabriel Fault. Or at least nobody who is publicizing the results of their research on the topic. However, yesterday’s earthquake re-confirmed what seismologists and geologists learned from the massive Landers Earthquake in June 1992: That seismic energy jumps from one fault to another during a major earthquake, and that the major California faults are: (i) like a row of slow falling dominos and (ii) like a system of wires which conduct electricity across a grid, in this case the electricity being seismic energy and the grid being Southern California’s major fault system. Ironically, the major geologist expect on Santa Clarita’s own San Gabriel Fault, is a geology professor from Texas who comes here every year to study the fault. An old, now retired geologist with the California Dept. of Mines and Geology (Weber) did extensive field work concerning our own powerhouse of a fault, Santa Clarita’s San Gabriel Fault, 15 to 20 years ago, before modern instrumentation was available. His reports can be read at the DMG office in Downtown L.A., but as far as I know are not online. Even more well hidden, obviously at the instance of the real estate development industry which influences Santa Clarita’s politics, is a thorough subsurface fault mapping program for Santa Clarita that occurred back in the late 1990′s to early 2000′s as a result of the Northridge Earthquake. Seismologists went around town, at select locations sending high intensity seismic waves into the ground, and mapping the fault data which bounced back. Rather than a big “unveiling” of the subsurface fault maps, with attendant hoopla in The Signal, those maps were just quietly put away on shelves in Sacramento and at California’s major seismology/geology libraries at Caltech, UC Berkeley, USC, UCLA, etc. Do you want to know what faults are under your house or your kid’s school? Do people outside of “Slippery Hills” want to know what kind of soil their home or their kid’s school is sitting on, and whether it will go flying in a major earthquake on the San Andreas/San Gabriel fault system? Only fools fail to understand that a building sitting ON a fault trace is far more likely to collapse than a building sitting on unfractured ground.
  9. Spineflower2April 5, 2010 at 1:58 pm
    And another aspect of this fault mapping process using explosives is the fact that although such mapping of the western end of the SCV would teach us volumes about groundwater movement over the underground “dam” that keeps the Saugus aquifer from emptying westward, Newhall Land forbade the mapping of their porperty west of I-5. Do you wonder why? Did you know the land along the future Portrero Road alignemnt broke during the Northridge quake? Talk about “telegraphing” fault energy! But we’ll never knwo about these faults under NewhalL Ranch because NLF blocked the USGS (I think it was) from drilling for, and setting, charges on their property. Now why do you think NLF doesn’t want us to know about faults under Newhall Ranch?
  10. Spineflower2April 5, 2010 at 2:00 pm
    Oh, that underwater mapping that would tell us about groundwater movement would have been really nice to know as we are dealing with Whittaker-Bermite groundwater pollution and containment wells, but we lack the info now. Thanks, NLF.
  11. janeApril 5, 2010 at 3:13 pm
    Jeff, I would be happy to donate, but don’t you have to disclose to the IRS who donates? Can I just mail you $20 without my name attached?
  12. Timothy MyersApril 5, 2010 at 5:02 pm
    Jane: This isn’t a charitable contribution. It is revenue that will cover the cost of hosting and bandwidth, so the IRS will not told your name.
  13. CCApril 5, 2010 at 9:52 pm
    Jane, the IRS wouldn’t bat at eye at $20 bucks.
  14. Spineflower2April 6, 2010 at 9:35 am
    Make a donation using a cashier’s check, so like PACs, you can make anonymous payments and not be traced.

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