CoastWatcher

Surf Access Barred at Baja’s Salsipuedes
October 22, 2007

Public road access to one of Baja California’s best waves, Punta Salsipuedes, is history. Surfers accustomed to giving the local family a few dollars to park and camp are now being turned away by security guards. Salsipuedes is part of the current development wave washing over coastal Northern Baja. Marketed to Americans as affordable coastal living, these developments are sprouting up from Playas de Tijuana to Ensenada.

According to the daily business report, San Diego Metropolitan, once completed, “Salsipuedes will have a boutique hotel and a mix of condos, homes and estate-size lots plus a commercial village with stores, cafes and restaurants,” Salsipuedes will become a retirement or vacation haven of 2,680 residences and guests in the five planned village hotels. “Salsipuedes is being developed and sold by Grupo Lagza, a binational real estate development company whose goal is to attract 80% of its clients from the United States? and who are marketing Salsi as “Baja’s Big Sur.” Recently, Surfrider’s San Diego Chapter shot down an attempt by company representatives for an endorsement of the Salsipuedes project as “surfer friendly.”? Among their promises was the claim that public access would not be restricted. Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/tijuana/20071021-9999-1n21sewage.html

U-T SPECIAL REPORT
Baja’s burden

Development boom on Gold Coast forces scrutiny of sewage plight

By Sandra Dibble
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
October 21, 2007

JIM BAIRD / Union-Tribune
Treated with chlorine to kill bacteria, a stream from Tijuana’s overburdened Punta Bandera wastewater treatment plant flows into the ocean. New plants are expected to relieve the city’s treatment system. But a development boom along the Tijuana-Ensenada corridor (below) has forced renewed scrutiny of coastal discharges.

Donald Trump’s portrait graces a billboard advertising condos for sale along a strip of land fronting the Pacific Ocean five miles south of the Mexican border.
What the sign doesn’t say is that the luxury condo complex under construction is a few hundred feet from Punta Bandera, Tijuana’s state-run sewage treatment plant. Read the rest of this entry »

Reclaiming the Coast
How the Coastal Commission allowed a nuclear power company to fence off public land, and how the public got some of it back

~ By ANDREW GUMBEL ~

http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=6345&IssueNum=228
POINT BUCHON – The gatekeeper was politely insistent and not especially friendly. He wanted our ID cards and full contact details, and he wanted to record them all very carefully in his ledger book. My partner and I had just strayed away from the Montaña de Oro State Park on the Central Coast, and on to the stretch of land where PG&E operates the Diablo Canyon nuclear power station.
Read the rest of this entry »

Poseidon’s Desalination Design a Decade Late-
Ocean desalination may be in our future, but it shouldn’t look like this.
By Joe Geever
http://voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2007/10/15/opinion/01geever101507.txt
Monday, Oct. 15, 2007

Poseidon Resources is proposing an ocean desalination plant in Carlsbad to sell water to local water agencies in the region. This water factory may have been an easy sell a decade ago. But today, even in a drought, we know too much to buy the plan.

Californians treasure our coast and ocean and we know how to implement water management plans that improve the environment — not further degrade it. Ocean desalination may be in our future, but recently enacted laws and court decisions to protect our environment have made this particular design out-dated before it even gets to the state agencies for permit review. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note:  Looks as though as least some Coastal Commissioners are willing to let OC Toll Road advocates lobby a bit longer.  While the project is still doomed, it now appears likely that it will not be denied by the Coastal Commission this Thursday, October 11, but instead will be delayed until the Coastal Commission’s San Diego meeting in February 2008. 

Since that isn’t sufficient time for the TCA to come up with a plan to abandon the “freeway to nowhere” and put their efforts toward the much needed widening and repairs to Interstate Highway 5, it is most likely the proposed freeway through San Onofre State Park will be denied by the Coastal Commission in February 2008.  Stay tuned….

Toll road delay rejected

By: DAVE DOWNEY – Staff Writer
Coastal commission staff refuses to take project off Oct. 11 agenda

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/10/05/news/top_stories/22_14_0310_4_07.txt

An Irvine-based agency that wants to build a six-lane toll road across a popular state park at San Onofre has asked for the delay of a key decision amid signs the project might be rejected. Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-toll3oct03,0,7901514.story?coll=la-news-comment
From the Los Angeles Times
No to the Foothill South Toll Road
Building a new toll route through parkland and pristine wilderness is not the way to go in Orange County.

October 3, 2007

Pity the folks with the thankless task of routing a highway in Southern California. The road will either displace or annoy the people who live and work along its path, or it will swallow and degrade increasingly scarce open space.

That said, toll road officials in Orange County chose a particularly troubling route for a new six-lane expressway. The proposed Foothill South Toll Road, which would bisect a private wilderness preserve and traverse the narrow length of an undeveloped coastal canyon, should not be built. Read the rest of this entry »