Apparently taking a cue from Democrat Party Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Costa Mesa Councilwoman Sandra Genis recently said former city council candidate “Harold Weitzberg’s last name did not sound like a “Costa Mesa name” per the Daily Pilot.
Weitzberg is Jewish, and Genis was clearly making an anti-Semitic reference to a potential political rival. The incident occurred at a Costa Mesans for Responsible Government meeting late last month. Continue reading
What a mess of conflicting predictions, estimates, projections and politics — here’s a YouTube for a 23rd March SoCal Insider segment by the excellent reporter/documentarian David Nazar at PBS SoCal (KOCE Channel 50) on the Poseidon Desal plant that’s looking for approval to be built on the beach near the AES Power Plant at Brookhurst and PCH in Huntington Beach.
We don’t think the Poseidon plant pencils and if it, or its owner, FAILS, its cost will end up on Orange County and/or HB taxpayers. But isn’t that always the case when a large public works project has issues? Certainly California High-Speed Rail will be an epic FAIL and not only end up costing us billions if it’s every built, but later generations as well.
We’ve never bought the extremists’ environmental arguments against Poseidon, because they were silly and unsupported with real fact — but the financial risks were overwhelming. For those reasons alone, Poseidon shouldn’t proceed. It’s not up to Debby Cook and her inflammations — she burned her credibility bridge by proselytizing about peak oil for so many years, and then shut up fast and looked for other liberal nostrums to peddle as the good news and great numbers from shale oil production started to emerge from drillers in fields across the United States.
Someone neutral, with no baggage and very very good financial chops needs to take a look at this project. Do we really need it? Is it cost justifiable and effective? Who gets stuck with the bill if it fails, or the demand isn’t there? Or is it just another public works boondoggle that we’ll be paying for for years after the hucksters are long gone?
As Brandon Ferguson in the OC Weekly makes clear in this piece from yesterday, Huntington Beach’s Poseidon Mis-Adventure, green money trumps green fanatics — the Poseidon desalination plant that might be built in Huntington Beach could be a fiscal nightmare. Ferguson picks apart this Register article from 1/21: Agencies line up for desalinated water from planned plant.
But contrary to the Register’s headline, Ferguson writes “18 local water agencies have recently signed non-binding letters of intent indicating their interest in purchasing desalinated water…[but] those letters expired a year ago” — and three agencies had already quit the original group of 23 — not the kind of sales forecast anyone would wish to deliver to one’s CEO.
The Weekly discussed the costs the Register didn’t: Continue reading