Congrats Foresters, Sayonara Bush?
Can the Santa Barbara Foresters move downtown? Can Bush be impeached? All that and more in this midweek Poodle update.
Author: Nick Welsh
Dripping, Dropping: More N-P-and County Planning-Bloodbath
With the forced lobotomization now taking place at the News-Press, reporters and editors who’ve accumulated any body of knowledge of the town or their beats are being chased out by a series of management “reforms.”
Drip, Drip: The Bloodbath Continues
The Santa Barbara News-Press remains very much like the Titanic in frantic search of more icebergs in which to crash. In this regard, about the only thing that might save Santa Barbara’s oldest daily paper is global warming.
News-Press Nine Win Ethics Award
Over the objections of Santa Barbara News-Press owner Wendy McCaw, the Society of Professional Journalists gave the Ethics in Journalism Award to nine of the News-Press editors and writers–including editor-in-chief Jerry Roberts and longtime columnist Barney Brantingham–who resigned from the paper in the past month, citing breaches of journalistic ethics by McCaw and her co-publisher and fiance, Arthur von Wiesenberger.
Sweet and Sour News for Creek
The good news about Mission Creek is that the California Coastal Commission (CCC) finally approved a flood-control and creek-restoration plan for the lower 1.3 miles of Santa Barbara’s downtown channel. The bad news is that in the six years since the creek plan was last before the CCC, the Army Corps of Engineers-the federal agency whose approval and funding have been critical to the life of the project-has run out of money.
Cottage Backs Off
After an intense and double-barreled lobbying campaign led by neighborhood activists and Cottage Hospital critics Cheri Rae and her husband John McKinney, Cottage officials reluctantly agreed to postpone an August 17 hearing on their plans to build 115 new homes on the site of the former St. Francis Hospital.
S.B. Considers Impeachment
About 250 people crammed into the Faulkner Gallery in the downtown library last Tuesday to hear three speakers lay out the case for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Positions Staked on Measure D
A coalition of anti-alternative transportation campaigners has charged that ballot arguments made on behalf of Measure D are false and misleading. The legal papers challenging the language on Measure D, which is on the ballot this November, were signed by Scott Wenz of Cars Are Basic and Greg Gandrud, a Carpinteria City Councilmember seeking reelection this fall.
In the Dog House Now
KA-BOOM: For those of you who regard train wrecks as a spectator sport, we currently have two such collisions unfolding before our very eyes. The first and more obvious crash involves the Santa Barbara News-Press, whose owner Wendy P. McCaw has proven yet again her willingness to cut off her head to spite her face. Citing disgust with McCaw’s poisonous management style, two more reporters walked off the job this past Friday, bringing the number of resigning editors and reporters to 13.
Nothing Fatal In St. Francis EIR
The final environmental impact report for one of the largest housing projects to hit downtown Santa Barbara-Cottage Hospital’s plan to tear down the former St. Francis Hospital and build 115 new homes in its place-contains no new surprises and no findings that could prove fatal to the project.
