A pair of bouquets – the Surgical Strikes award – to Supervisors Dianne Jacob and Pam Slater-Price for dressing the wounds Wednesday after dozens of Valley Center residents had finished blasting their supervisor, Bill Horn.
The broken bone of contention was a proposed two-mile road in northwest Valley Center that two years ago Horn deemed “critical.” With his fellow supervisors' approval, Horn directed county planners to study the development of a specific planning area, or SPA, in which developers would receive increased housing density in exchange for paying for the road.
A couple of months ago, that task mysteriously turned into a fact on the county's map of future growth, scaring the hell out of Valley Center residents.
According to the planners, as many as 3,000 houses and 10 acres of commercial space would be crammed into the 1,600-acre rural enclave. A developer who had backed Horn's re-election started buying up property before the SPA was broached in 2006.
To his credit, Horn kept his cool as his constituents savaged him. When it was his turn, he argued convincingly that the road, called 3A – the western end of a long-discussed road into the heart of Valley Center – had been kicking around various maps for decades.
But Horn avoided two crucial issues:
First, 3A was conceived as part of an evacuation route from the center of Valley Center, not an exclusive escape route for the northwest corner, which already has outlets to Interstate 15, most notably West Lilac Road. If funded and built in isolation, 3A appears less a fire evacuation route for Valley Center than a ruse to build lots of houses clustered near I-15.
Second, Horn failed to address the sheer enormity of the planning area. Though he said, “I don't want to destroy my community,” he never acknowledged the obvious: Adding 10,000 people to Valley Center's current 17,000 population is huge, proportionally akin to adding 700,000 new residents to the city of San Diego or 90,000 to Oceanside.
Fortunately, Jacob and Slater-Price were prepared to apply salves and compresses.
Slater-Price underscored the utter absurdity of a new, two-lane road as a fire evacuation route for Valley Center when 10,000 new residents would clog it well beyond its capacity.
Jacob finished the surgery: How did a subject of study, a possible specific planning area, become a reality on a map without open debate?
Jacob exposed to sunlight the blatant weirdness of the process. Thanks to her motion – and Slater-Price's skeptical signal – the SPA was erased from the map, with Horn voting in favor.
True, Horn was allowed to keep his fig leaf – 3A remains in the general-plan update. But without money to pay for it, it's just what it has been on and off again for decades: a line on a map.
A brick – the Bad News Day award – to Rod King, Fallbrook High's principal, for turning school newspaper adviser Dave Evans and student journalists into poster kids for the First Amendment as it relates to the schoolhouse.
According to reports, King booted Evans from his advisory job June 5, the last day of school. Why? Because Evans was so concerned that two censored articles would result in a lawsuit that he conferred with a school board member June 4.
The upshot is that the Tomahawk, Fallbrook High's newspaper, will go dark next year.
It appears that Fallbrook once again has run afoul of the law governing student speech. Of all school communities in North County, you'd think Fallbrook would err on the side of expression, not suppression.
In 1986, two Fallbrook students – Daniel Gluesenkamp and Philip Tiso – were briefly suspended for producing The Hatchet Job, an underground, 12-page tabloid that in one edition featured a photograph of a school board president, a congressman and a U.S. secretary of education. The satiric caption suggested that the three officials were discussing a drug deal.
The ACLU galloped to the defense of the student journalists. A judge ruled that the suspensions were illegal and, as the result of a settlement, the district apologized, paid the boys $22,000 and sponsored a one-day workshop on students' rights to free speech. Buoyed by the moral victory and financial bonus, Gluesenkamp and Tiso went on to university and productive careers.
The two censored pieces for the Tomahawk – a November article dealing with the departure of a controversial superintendent and a recent opinion piece critical of abstinence-only sex-ed classes – don't appear to be the stuff of obscenity, libel or incitements to illegal or disruptive actions.
What a bad joke it would be if, once again, Fallbrook High School performs a legal hatchet job on itself.
A soft brick – the Heart Is a Beastly Hunter award – to Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, who has the blogosphere and liberal cable TV laughing like hyenas over his ill-fated desire to mix charity in Chad with his passion for big-game hunting.
Hunter's staff recently contacted the U.S. Embassy in Chad, inquiring if the congressman could go into the bush, shoot wildebeest and then distribute the cured meat to the 230,000 starving refugees who fled Darfur, according to Al Kamen's column on washingtonpost.com.
The State Department responded with several talking points, including the fact that there are no wildebeest in the Chadian wild. Moreover, “the government of Chad does not permit the hunting of large animals.”
Hunter's office reportedly called and said the congressman's plans for African hunting trips remain unclear, but Chad appears to be off the itinerary.
Logan Jenkins: (760) 737-7555; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
