Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Sorted by date Results 101 - 125 of 456
August 12, 2022 - NMS, one of the largest developers of property in Santa Monica, won a bid to depose Santa Monica Mayor Sue Himmelrich's husband, Michael Soloff, in a court decision July 26 regarding NMS's lawsuit against a rent-control law passed by the city in August of 2020. The City's Motion to Stay Discovery was denied on July 26 by U.S. District Judge Fernando L. Aenlle-Rocha. Soloff is co-chair of Santa Monicans for Renter's Rights, the progressive political party who has held power in S...
August 5, 2022 - At her media briefing yesterday, LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, declined to answer a question from a Los Angeles Times reporter regarding to what extent it is safer to be around a person who is vaccinated. Ferrer does not typically miss answering a question from the press, even if multiple questions come from one reporter. Data from the Health Department's website on "Outcomes by Vaccination Status," clearly show that transmission among the fully...
August 2, 2022 - City officials were warned of dangerous conditions on the grounds of the central Santa Monica Public Library well in advance of the fatal stabbing Friday evening in the north courtyard of the building. Santa Monica property and business owner John Alle has been recording the takeover of the city's downtown by vagrancy and crime since the start of the Covid-19-related lockdown in 2020. On July 8, 2022, roughly three weeks before the library stabbing, he emailed city officials...
August 2, 2022 - The Novavax vaccine to prevent serious disease in Covid-19 will begin to be administered at county Public Health vaccination sites beginning tomorrow, Wednesday, August 3. The Novavax injection uses older, protein-based technology rather than the novel mRNA technology utilized by the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. According to Dr. Glenn Wortmann, infectious disease specialist at MedStar Health, as reported by CNET, Novavax is similar to the Hepatitis B vaccine and those...
July 28, 2022 - There will be no reinstitution of an indoor mask mandate in public spaces, Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer announced today in a media briefing. She had announced two weeks ago that if the number of Covid-related hospitalizations remained above a certain level for two weeks in a row, she would issue a Health Order requiring masks be worn in all public indoor spaces. But she said that a recent decline in hospital admissions was bringing the county out of what the Centers for...
July 14, 2022 - Dr. Barbara Ferrer, Director of Public Health for Los Angeles County, says they will impose a universal indoor mask mandate for public spaces starting July 29. She thinks it highly unlikely the county will reverse course and the number of Covid-19-positive hospital patients will decrease given a steady increase in the number of infections. Today, the county moved into a "high" level of transmission per guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control, with more than 10...
July 8, 2022 - Los Angeles County has been living under the threat of a new indoor mask mandate for weeks now as Covid-19 cases, driven by various Omicron subvariants, bring more Covid patients to area hospitals. Once there are over 10 Covid patients per 100,000 residents in the hospital, the county is deemed by Centers for Disease Control guidance to be in a High transmission level. A patient is a Covid patient if they test positive for Covid, whether they suffer from the disease or not. If...
June 30, 2022 - On Tuesday night, the City Council narrowly voted to appoint three business property owners to the Downtown Santa Monica, Inc board instead of the previous council-connected outsiders. DTSM is a "private" non-profit organization that is supposed to work with the City government to manage services and operations in downtown Santa Monica. The 13-member board of DTSM is made up of 6 members appointed by the City Council, 6 members elected by the dues-paying property owners in the...
June 23, 2022 - Both the Centers for Disease Control and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health are revealing that individuals who are up to date with their Covid-19 booster shots are becoming infected with the virus at nearly twice the rate as the merely vaccinated. The unexpected reversal of the vaccine's effect is more pronounced in some age groups than others, according to data from the LADPH. On June 19, CBS news showed a case rate chart from the CDC that showed the simply...
June 23, 2022 - At a media briefing this afternoon, Dr. Paul Simon, the County Health Department's Chief Science Officer, pushed back the prediction for when transmission will reach the point of triggering new indoor mask mandates. Last week, the county had predicted that the 7-day cumulative hospitalization admission rate would exceed 10 per 100,000 people around June 30. Should hospital admission rate remain higher than that for two consecutive weeks, the health department would issue an...
June 24, 2022 - The death rates from Covid-19 for the past month have been so low for those under 50 years old that the Los Angeles County Health Department is unable to show them on a bar chart. Even the unvaccinated are not expiring from Covid at a rate that can be shown on the chart at the health department's Covid central. "Rates for some age categories are not shown due to small numbers," is the explanation given on the chart that only shows death rates for those over 50 years of age. The...
A tip developed by a Community Violence Reduction Division investigator led to the seizure of 14,000 pounds of illegal fireworks in Azusa ahead of the 4th of July weekend. In a press release, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon said, "By embedding our prosecutors and investigators in the communities that we serve, we were able to secure valuable information that led to the safe removal of thousands of pounds of illegal fireworks." The district attorney's office investigators, working...
June 24, 2022 - The City of Santa Monica abruptly halted continuing its planned demolition of Parking Structure 3 downtown amid allegations it was not sufficiently protecting the public against exposure to asbestos and other contaminants. Residents and business and property owners have been noticing large amounts of dust in the air from the city's demolition of its own parking structure. According to local property owner John Alle, air dust samples taken by his environmental engineers showed...
June 15, 2022 - Pools of urine, tagged walls, drug addicts, and homeless squatters greeted downtown Santa Monica property owner John Alle as he arrived early to work the morning following the City Council meeting that approved extending the contract with Allied Universal Security. The security company is charged with patrolling the seven public garages and associated alleyways overnight until 6 am in the morning. The Block by Block Ambassadors take over patrol duty at 6 am, but often show up at...
June 16, 2022 - Yesterday evening, a specialty store located in the 1300 block of the Third Street Promenade was robbed of nearly $20,000 in gold by a group invading the store. The robbery occurred at approximately 7:30 pm when it was still light outside. Property owner John Alle was right outside the store when he saw the robbery. The store owner is a friend of his. Alle says he saw a Safety Ambassador walk directly away from the situation when he realized something was happening. Recently,...
June 14, 2022 - An editorial in the Santa Monica Mirror by Santa Monica College Board of Trustee Vice-Chair and Downtown Santa Monica, Inc. Chair Barry Snell advocating the continuation of the Downtown Ambassador program was met with a scathing retort from property and business owner John Alle. Snell claimed that DTSM, the quasi-governmental body charged with upkeep and promotion of the Third Street and Promenade, was "fully aware of concerns regarding public safety" in the agency's area of...
June 14, 2022 - In a passionate letter to the Santa Monica City Council, former Mayor and Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights co-founder Denny Zane blasted Councilmember Phil Brock's proposed tax on the transfer of property, saying it was "poison pill" designed to undermine a competing - and much higher tax - proposed by Mayor Sue Himmelrich. His letter was rebutted by Santa Monica Audit Subcommittee member Marc Verville, an expert in corporate finance, who called Zane's arguments "spurious,"...
June 10, 2022 - For at least one school year, if not more, the entire campus of Muir Elementary/Smash on 4th Street in Santa Monica will be evacuated. The decision to relocate students and staff came after a May 24 report by Alta Environmental NV5 that found two rooms with unacceptable levels of mold and eleven rooms with water damage that could mean mold growth. One room had visible mold growing behind the dry erase board. The high spore level in the other room was deemed "likely originated...
June 10, 2022 - Results from the primary election that was held on June 7 are still preliminary as vote-by-mail ballots still have several days to reach their destination. But results are available from the 580,358 vote-by-mail ballots already received and the 242,187 votes cast at vote centers. The following data from the California Secretary of State and the Los Angeles County Registrar/Recorder are as of June 9 and June 8 respectively. For almost all offices, candidates must run in the...
June 2, 2022 - Los Angeles County public health officials announced this morning that they believe an adult resident has contracted a monkeypox infection. If the case is confirmed by the CDC, it will be the first case in the county, though not the first in the state, which was announced on May 26. The individual believed to have monkeypox recently traveled, say public officials, and had a known "close contact" with a case. That patient is symptomatic but not hospitalized although they are...
June 2, 2022 - The Westside Current broke the news yesterday that Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin of District 11 has hired a private security company to guard his government office in Westchester. On Tuesday, Bonin voted against a Los Angeles City Council motion to prohibit homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools. Debra Huston, a resident of Westchester, discovered the private security guarding Bonin's office when she attempted to enter the building yesterday. The security guard...
May 27, 2022 - California State Senator Ben Allen's law, SB 1290, which he alleges addresses regulating street vendors, such as those who've spent time crowding the Santa Monica Pier, does not adequately address unpermitted vendors, who are the ones causing the problems. Allen's proposal, already passed in the Senate, 23-4, would allow local authorities to impose fines for violations of "a local authority's sidewalk vending program" that are not based - as current law requires - on an...
May 26, 2022 - Barbara Ferrer, director of the LA County Department of Public Health, announced at her media briefing today that a first case of Monkeypox has been confirmed in the Sacramento area of California. "The risk to residents of LA county is very low," she added. Monkeypox is not usually a serious disease but it can be, Ferrer told the press. It does not usually occur in the United States but has been confined to Africa until very recently. Typically, the disease begins with flu-like...
May 26, 2022 - Property owners surrounding the former downtown Santa Monica parking structure 3 noticed that the lights attached to the building were permanently shut off on Tuesday evening, May 10, by Southern California Edison. These lights illuminate the alley behind the parking structure for about 225 linear feet. . In addition, 8 city light poles from Arizona to Santa Monica Boulevard are out. On top of the lack of light at night, the construction site is left unlocked at night. In letter...
May 18, 2022 - The city of Santa Monica prides itself on being environmentally sustainable. In fact, an entire division of the city is devoted to sustainability, where the government website states, "For more than 25 years, our mission has been to use the power of community to enhance our resources, prevent harm to the natural environment and human health, and benefit the social and economic well-being of the community for the sake of current and future generations." But when it comes to the...
