Friday, June 6, 2008

CM PRESS # 386


THE STATE OF OUR CITY
(Turn away from the shoals Cap'n)

The ability of some people to see negative statistics about our city and simply shrug them off as though they're an aberration, or not see them as symptoms of a larger problem, and look at them as though they're just isolated problems not connected to anything else, never ceases to amaze me.

How much of a pattern must one see to understand that it is a pattern?

The latest negative stats involve our two high schools which have now been ranked down in the cellar with the worst high schools in the county.

Of 63 high schools in Orange County, Estancia was ranked at 51 and Costa Mesa at 58. And, those aren't golf scores, folks. The worst high school in the county was Century in Santa Ana, which came in dead last at 63.

The sad truth is that the problem with our high schools is not a school district or a school or a teacher problem. And it is not a problem that can be solved by concentrating on "fixing" the schools.

The low rankings are just symptoms of a larger disease. These rankings are to our city what a bump on the skin is to skin cancer. We have a city problem. That's what needs to be fixed. Fix it, and the bump will go away.

The fact is that schools are ranked good or bad based on how well or how poorly the students do on standardized tests. If a city sends students to the school who don't test well, then the school is ranked accordingly.

And, Costa Mesa is sending too many students to our schools who are doing poorly on tests.

So, what does this have to do with Costa Mesa, generally?

Just this. So long as Costa Mesa remains an ersatz illegal alien sanctuary city with a seeming wish to become a new Santa Ana, we are going to have failing schools, high crime, loitering day workers, lower than they should be home values, gangs, graffiti, abandoned shopping carts and all the badges of slum cities.

Instead of fixing these problems, our City Council continues to put bandaids on them. And, folks, we're running out of room for bandaids.

The patient is now covered with them. Abandoned shopping carts? Hey, put the bandaid of paying $40,000 per year to have a service pick them up. Graffiti? Why, pay more than $ 200,000 per year to cover it up. Gangs? Hire more and more gang police officers. And so it goes.
We're constantly covering up the problems instead of solving them.

And, the maddening thing about this is that Costa Mesa should be trending more like our traditional slightly prettier sister city of Newport Beach instead of like Santa Ana.

But, dear reader, you're sharp as a tack and you're saying, okay so why are we the way we are and what do we do about it if we don't like it?

The answer is simple.

Our City Council has to stop hiding in the tall grass and needs to start doing the things that have not been done by prior City Councils. It needs to cure the disease. And, specifically, what are some of the major things that have to be done to turn our city around?

--We have to break the stranglehold of the mostly out of town industrialists who are holding 60 plus acres of ocean close Westside Bluffs land captive to downscale industrial uses so that land can rise to its highest and best use for homes that will attract upwardly mobile people back to our city. As these high achievers put their kids in our schools, our school scores will go up.

--We have to break apart the over concentration of slum buildings and start meeting our state mandated affordable housing requirements by building modern affordable housing to replace our present sardine-can, barracks style, functionally obsolete deteriorating apartments--our version of the projects--that are over crowded breeding grounds for gangs and crime.

--We have to pull in all the welcome mats for illegal aliens. This means, in part, that we have to stop funding charities with tax payer funds that are acting as magnets for illegal aliens and which supply them with everything from free medical and dental care to free bags of groceries.

There's more that could be written, but they are mostly lesser included things of the above that a competent City Council will automatically do, if the Council keeps its collective hands on the rudder and starts steering our city away from the shoals that loom ever closer.

Doubt that we're heading for the shoals? Go back and read about our low High School scores. Do you need to feel the salt spray from the waves crashing against the rocks to understand that's where we're heading?

I've used some terminology of the sea for a purpose. Costa Mesa is a coastal community. We should never forget this, and we should use this geographic fact to help our city improve. Once again, that means we need homes on our close to the ocean Westside Bluffs--not factories.

Costa Mesa is not a landlocked inner city with little going for it, and we should stop acting as though it is.
# # #
ARTISTS SPUR GENTRIFICATION IN THE BRONX (ARE YOU LISTENING, COSTA MESA?)

LINK

# # #
MAYOR BEVER ON THE RIGHT TRACK WITH NEWPORT BEACH

The CM PRESS has long believed that Costa Mesa and Newport Beach should cooperate on just about everything.

We see the two cities as natural sister cities and we believe that almost every link between the two cities can provide benefits to both cities.

So, we were pleased to read that Costa Mesa's Mayor Bever and Newport's Mayor Selich are working together on a possible sports complex on the Westside Bluffs. LINK


Politics is a people business. Building relationships of trust and friendship (and, we're just assuming that this is what is developing between Mr. Bever and Mr. Selich) can only, in our specific situation in Costa Mesa, benefit the citizens of our city as we try to make Costa Mesa a nicer place to live.
# # #
Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.



 http://frankspeech.com/