August 2010 Archives

Olympic Gold Medalist and Hermosa Beach resident Kerri Walsh has told the Manhattan Beach City Council she won't be participating in this weekend's Manhattan Beach Open if rule changes are allowed. Just last week, the AVP announced it would be canceling the rest of this year's tour because of financial hardships.

City officials told the Daily Breeze last week the event will be a much more scaled down version from years prior.

"Volleyball is the main emblem of this city and the Manhattan Beach Open is a classic tournament," Mayor Mitch Ward said. "It won't be the AVP, but we'll move forward.

"We're going old school," Ward added. "Spectators will be right there next to the players."

From The Associated Press:

Olympic gold medalist Kerri Walsh is threatening to boycott this weekend's revamped Manhattan Beach Open because the beach volleyball tournament won't be played under the accepted international rules.

The crown jewel of the beach volleyball circuit is being run by the city of Manhattan Beach this year because the AVP tour collapsed last week from financial hardship.

Event organizers decided not to use the rules adopted by the Olympics and international tours to shorten the matches and make them TV-friendly. The biggest change is that points are scored on every rally, instead of just when the serving team wins the point.

Walsh said in a letter to the Manhattan Beach City Council that the rules are outdated and dividing the fragile sport.

Event organizers say they're taking the sport back to its roots.

Heal the Bay has released a satirical video on the life of the wild plastic bag, "one of the most clever and illustrious creatures" in the "open plains of the asphalt jungle." It's narrated by Jeremy Irons.

Styled like a nature documentary, "The Majestic Plastic Bag" is a bid for support for AB 1998, which would end the use of the disposable sacks at many stores.

Plastic bags are not indigenous to the Pacific Ocean, Heal the Bay reminds us. 

Here are some stats on plastic bags from the group: 19 billion bags are used annually, creating over 123,000 tons of waste. The bags cost $25 million to clean up each year, and less than 5 percent of all single-use plastic bags are recycled.

The Santa Monica-based ocean advocacy group's video is markedly similar to a much longer -- and more sorrowful and contemplative -- version of the same story of a bag's life that came out a few months ago.

That 20-minute short film comes from Ramin Bahrani, who is (full disclosure) a friend of a friend of mine. It's part of a project for emerging directors called Futurestates that examines "possible future scenarios through the prism of today's global realities."

In it, a plastic bag longs to return to its "maker" -- the woman who first is given the bag at a grocery store. The bag speaks in first person, voiced by another film luminary: Werner Herzog.

In both films, the bags end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The two pieces are filled with lovingly filmed shots of plastic bags drifting across the landscape. I guess no one can forget that scene from "American Beauty."

For more information about Heal the Bay's campaign in support of AB 1998 is on the organization's website.

Sharks have been on our minds recently, and it's not just because we're still reeling from Shark Week.

The Daily Breeze recently looked at research conducted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium revealing that white sharks are migrating down the coast, and in some cases, right through Santa Monica Bay.

And it was only a few days ago that two local 12-year-olds allegedly saw a six foot Tiger Shark while spearfishing off RAT beach near Malaga Cove.

And now, this:

Orange County-based stand up paddle boarder Chuck Patterson recently recorded some unreal footage: two Great White Sharks cruising underwater several hundred yards off San Onofre State Beach, about 45 miles down the coast.

Patterson noticed the sharks the day before while on his SUP several hundreds yards off the coast. He returned with an HD camera mounted on a 10 foot pole. Within five minutes a massive shark appeared, circled his SUP twice and swam away.

Clark estimated one of the sharks at around 9 feet.

"It was an unreal experience that I will cherish forever," Patterson wrote on his blog, where the video has been posted.

The area off San Onofre has historically been known to attract the endangered species.

  

Me my Shark and I from Chuck Patterson on Vimeo.

In the wake of the revelation (by the LA Times) that the small city of Bell pays its city manager and City Council members huge salaries, local municipalities are scrambling to publicize their salary schedules.
No South Bay cities pay their councils or employees anything near Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo's $800,000 salary. But Carson city employees don't seem to be suffering either.
Here is a link to their salary schedules, which were posted on the city's website this week. The website lists the salaries in monthly increments.

Here are some samples of the top earning annual pay for these job titles:

Chief Deputy City Clerk: $108,456
Traffic Engineer: $116,772
Locksmith: $56,016
Recreation Program Supervisor: $71,676
Senior Bus Driver: $50,724
Manager of Storm Water Quality Programs: $108,456
Associate Planner: $71,244


** By the way, the Daily Breeze will publish a story on Sunday about the salaries of local elected officials and city managers **

The city of Hermosa Beach has posted a list of each employee's compensation in 2009.

Some earnings of note:

- City Manager Steve Burrell earned a $200,00 base salary.

 

- Police Chief Greg Savelli earned $191,986.77, including deferred compensation and allowances.

 

- Fire Chief David Lantzer earned $148,480, including deferred compensation and allowances.

City council members receive a $530 monthly payment, up from their $300 monthly salary four years ago. Council members are also allowed to participate in the city's benefits program, in addition to a car allowance while they are in office. All council members, however, opted not to take benefits or the car allowance. Council member Howard Fishman declined his monthly salary.

The city of Manhattan Beach, I'm told, will also be putting up compensation info online. Communities on the Hill have also recently posted some salary information. 

A more detailed and comprehensive look at earnings of city officials and elected leaders in South Bay cities will appear in Sunday's Daily Breeze.

Compensation for city officials across California has been targeted by residents and media outlets after a series of articles published in the Los Angeles Times revelead that officials in the small community of Bell were receiving huge and exorbitant compensation packages.

Gardena has too many nail salons, doughnut shops, and stores selling insurance, cell phones, tobacco and alcohol. At least, that's what the City Council members decided last year when they agreed to crack down on which business licenses they approve.
But the council seems to have a soft spot for at least one national chain drugstore. On Tuesday night, the council voted 4-0 to allow Walgreens retail store to sell beer and wine. Mayor Paul Tanaka was absent.
The council's decision overturned the city's Planning and Environmental Quality Commission's denial of Walgreens' application in June. The commission turned the drugstore down because the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control said the Gardena Walgreens store (on Redondo Beach Boulevard near Normandie Avenue) is in an area of "undue concentration" of alcohol sales. Two convenience stores within two blocks of the Walgreens already sell alcoholic beverages.
This decision is opposite one the council made last April when it denied a business owner an application to sell liquor at the former Boulevard Liquor & Keg store in a retail strip on the city's western edge. Then, council members agreed that the city has too many alcohol retailers and it reflects badly on the community.
The council took a step further last September when it gave a developer a list of the types of tenants it would not accept in the city -- including doughnut shops, cell phone stores and others.

The National Weather Service issued an explanation Wednesday detailing reasons why the sun has stubbornly refused to come out this summer.

The average temperature in July at LAX was 69.4 degrees, about 3.6 degrees below the normal average.

From the statement:

FOR THE BETTER PART OF THE PAST TWO AND A HALF MONTHS...AN UPPER LEVEL TROUGH HAS BEEN LOCATED ALONG OR JUST OFF THE WEST COAST. THIS HAS MAINTAINED A SIGNIFICANT MARINE INFLUENCE ACROSS COASTAL AND VALLEY AREAS OF SOUTHWESTERN CALIFORNIA. TYPICAL NIGHT THROUGH MORNING LOW CLOUDS AND FOG...WHICH TEND TO BE ABUNDANT IN MAY AND JUNE...USUALLY BECOME MUCH LESS WIDESPREAD IN JULY AND AUGUST. THE PRESENCE OF THE PERSISTENT TROUGH HAS BEEN A FACTOR IN PREVENTING THE TYPICAL DECREASE IN LOW CLOUDS AND FOG THIS SUMMER. IN ADDITION...OCEAN WATER TEMPERATURES ARE BELOW NORMAL... SO DAILY SEA BREEZES HAVE BEEN EXTRA CHILLY...ESPECIALLY NEAR THE IMMEDIATE COAST.

 

You can read the rest of the statement (which is in all caps, BTW) here. 

Behold, the future.

A startling new advancement in the surf industry could be upon us: Surfboard headlights.

The "Night Stalker" is designed by Bill Stewart of San Clemente-based Stewart Surfboards and will be auctioned Saturday during Billabong's Art of Shaping charity event, held at the San Diego Convention Center. Proceeds from the auction go to benefit the 2010 SIMA Humanitarian Fund. The board (a 5 fin, it's worth noting) features two rechargeable battery powered adjustable headlights and a plexi-glass nose panel. The side fins house LEDs, too.
 
Now, before we all write off surfboard headlights as a fad or gimmick with little use - other than maybe attracting our sharp-toothed friends - it's important to keep in mind that thrusters, the fish, quad fins, SUPs, heck, even surfing itself, were all at one time thought to be little more than passing trends.
 
No word yet on what the opening bid is.

OK, so last week was actually the Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week. It was on Monday that the Daily Breeze's Doug Morino looked at sightings of great white sharks locally. And there's more on that today from a San Diego-area blogger.

But for two local 12-year-olds, today was most definitely one serious shark day.

Here's the story that Chris Stimpfl and Will Myers relayed to me about an adventure they had this morning at Rat Beach in the Malaga Cove area.

It was a cloudy morning, and the water was murky. With Chris' mom watching from shore, the pair headed out to spearfish, a sport they learned from Will's dad about a year ago.

Dropping into the water from a reef area 20 yards from shore, Will sank down to the ocean floor, about 13 feet below.

"I was just skimming the bottom for halibut ... I didn't see anything. When I was coming up toward the surface, I saw this shadow," Will said. He thought maybe it was a rumored 80-pound seabass he'd heard about.

"Then I looked closely and noticed the prints on it. It was about 6 feet long. Its mouth was closed and it was moving slowly. It was arms-length, really thick."

He started to panic.

"I heard him make a really weird noise with his snorkel, and he came up yelling, 'Shark! get out of the water!' I looked under and there was a giant shark," Chris said.

They raced back to shore, with Chris dropping his spear gun on the way.

"We got washed up on the rocks. We didn't care if we got bruised. We were scared," Will said. "That was probably the scariest moment of my life, by far."

Safely back on the sand, they went to find a lifeguard but couldn't. While Chris' mom tried unsuccessfully to spot the shark's fin in her camera, the boys told others at the beach.

They got a skeptical reaction.

"They were saying it's probably a leopard shark, but we didn't believe them because we had just been watching Shark Week, so we kind of knew it was a tiger shark," Will said.

The pair returned to Chris' home, racing to the computer to find out what they had seen. Images online confirmed their suspicions: it was a tiger shark.

Local lifeguards aren't so sure, however.

Many people would argue that Russia's most important export is not communism, vodka, tennis players, suburban spy rings or even supermodels. Many would argue, rather, that it's Tetris, the video game sensation first introduced to gamers in the United States during the 1980s.

And nowhere was the popularity of the puzzle game more evident than this weekend in Los Angeles, where hundreds of Tetris enthusiasts packed the Downtown Independent Theater for the first ever Classic World Tetris Championship.

Taking home top honors and earning the esteemed title of Worl'ds Greatest Tetris Player was 29-year-old Redondo Beach resident Jonas Neubauer. He beat out a tournament field of about 400 competitors. According to twingalaxies.com, the official video game record keeping website, Neubauer shares the puzzle game's high score of 999,999 with Los Angeles resident Harry Hong, who he faced in Sunday's final. Here is a Youtube video of Neubauer achieving that score.

His story appeared in today's Daily Breeze.

Good lord, this story just does not end! The Los Angeles Times just reported that SEVEN MORE employees in Bell are making exorbitant salaries.

The amount of their annual paychecks -- which range from $238,075 for a police captain to $422,707 for the director of administrative services -- was announced at a press conference held by the new interim city manager.

Activists reportedly disrupted the news conference.

The Times also reported that two employees received large loans from the city. Wow.

This is a good time for me to note that all four Palos Verdes Peninsula have posted city manager salary information on their websites in response to the Bell scandal.

Los Angeles did so for all city employees today (PDF). For much of the day, I wasn't able to access the site -- I guess too many people want to know how much their friends and neighbors make, not to mention top administrators. But the data only list job titles, not names.

A fancy Palos Verdes Peninsula home makes today's regular "View From Your Window" feature on commentator Andrew Sullivan's blog at The Atlantic. 

Anybody on The Hill want to claim this gorgeous view? Or cop to reading "The Daily Dish"? I can do the latter, but obviously not the former.

Wait, is that Melahat Uzumcu's house on Paseo del Mar? Omg, I think it is.

She will speak to Warren Olney on "Which Way LA" at 7 p.m. on KCRW on 89.9 FM.

The show also streams on the Web here.

Gone are the days when cross-training for surfers meant a few push ups and an occasional jog along the beach. Now, the modern surfer stays in shape with the help of personal trainers, organic diets and cardio boot camps.

Need proof that surfing fitness has evolved? Look no further than the magazine rack at your local bookstore, which is filled with surf mags featuring training tutorials, conditioning tips, even oatmeal recipes. 

The Wall Street Journal recently examined the workout regimen of a 42-year-old arts commissioner living in D.C. who attends weekly workout boot camps and conditioning sessions with a private trainer to prepare for surfing sessions. She even uses an indo board during breaks in the workday to prepare for her $3,000, biannual surf trips.  

And at WSJ.com, Steve Walters, an Internet entrepreneur, contends on the paper's Hire Education blog that job hunters have much to learn from sitting on the beach and watching surfers, well, surf:

Some surfers are very aggressive trying to catch every wave, big or small. Others are more selective, biding their time for those waves that look or feel right. No matter the surfing style, they frequently fall or miss the wave. The better surfers make better decisions, and stay on their boards longer. At times, a good ride is interrupted by another surfer. But no matter what, they always paddle back out again. The waves keep coming.

The Los Angeles Times' continuing coverage of the salary scandal in Bell has delved into property taxes, finding that homeowners in wealthier communities pay less taxes than those in poor cities. Property owners in Bell pay the second-highest rate in the Los Angeles County, the paper reported.

The trends holds in the South Bay, according to the Times' reporting. In fact, five of our cities are in the bottom tenth of municipalities countywide in property tax rates.

There is a major caveat to this comparison, however. It doesn't include special assessments such as those approved by voters in Torrance Unified and Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified school districts, not to mention sewer fees and lighting districts and the like. And of course, lower tax rates on homes of much higher value still result in greater property tax payments for wealthy homeowners than for those that own lower-valued homes.

Nonetheless, the base tax rate information is interesting.

Have a look: Nelow is the list of local cities pulled from the LAT's look at all 88 cities in Los Angeles County.

City                            Rank --  Median Income  --  Property Tax Percentage

Inglewood                      10           $46,574                 1.279126

Los Angeles                  13           $48,610                 1.220441

Carson                          17           $70,645                 1.179221

Gardena                        18           $52,897                 1.179221

Lomita                          19           $59,059                  1.179221

Hawthorne                     36           $43,602                 1.122403

Lawndale                       59           $53,150                 1.095951

Torrance                        74           $76,866                 1.075651

Redondo Beach             75           $92,263                  1.074358

Manhattan Beach           79          $136,481                 1.059263

Palos Verdes Estates     80          $167,344                 1.055672

Rancho Palos Verdes     81          $128,321                 1.055672

Rolling Hills                    82          $184,777                 1.055672

Rolling Hills Estates        83          $145,628                 1.055672

Hermosa Beach              86          $109,509                 1.036418

(Rates may vary because of school district or other special assessments not included in the above list. All property owners pay a 1 percent tax, plus whatever assessments are added by local governments. The average rate is 1.16 percent, according to the Times.)