Record Metro Columnist Michael Fitzgerald's Blog

News10 is still beating up City Hall over the waiting-for-Godot Marshall Plan. What a blood feast. It is clear Mayor Ann Johnston never should have said thing one about a Marshall Plan at her State of the City Address. She had nothing.

That said, southside activists like Motecozuma Sanchez don’t necessarily speak for anyone but themselves. Proper coverage of this issue includes getting beyond the handful of ornery regulars who show up to berate the Council. Pounding the pavement for a few blocks along Eighth Street and several similar neighblorhoods would do the trick.

That would succeed in getting the southside’s perspective, at least. But that is just one or two political districts in this city. Leaders have to govern the whole enchilada. My point is the emerging sense that the public is angry at City Hall over the Marshall Plan may derive from too small a sample.

The real outrage occurred before this administration’s watch, when drunken-sailor spending so compromised city finances that the police department could not weather the recession without a scary reduction in cops. The Marshall Plan is just a well-meaning mayor’s attempt to piece together some of the wreckage. 

An equally deserving target would be former Mayor Ed Chavez, whose complacent over-spending helped create this mess. But he’s out of range in Indio, playing the links until Happy Hour.

There may be a link, says the National Recourses Defense Council. And a link to lower IQs.

Laurie Tackett writes:

“I own a  little mother/daughter Burger place in Pollock Pines. I was reading up on (disabled lawyer/lawsuit factory) Scott N. Johnson and was shocked when I read your article  …

“I can not believe he is allowed to do this to people. People like him are destroying lives. I have no idea if this lawsuit is on me or the owner of the property, all I do know is that I can not afford it and I will probably be just another business he puts under.

“Sad part is that I had been on unemployment for two years when I decided to put everything in this for my family and I. My 17-year old daughter graduated high school at 16 and has been running the business with me. She actually just won the best customer service award in Pollock Pines she was one of 58 nominees. If we have to close down we won’t even have unemployment to fall back on. There should be a limit on how many someone can sue and how much money they can extort.”

Of course, they never bothered to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The Sweet 16 part of the message should not obscure their responsibility. Still, it’s tragic to see ordinary people knocked around this way. Some see Johnson as a hero. But the flawed law also allows for a sort of sociopathy.

The new poll that shows most people don’t even know what the Sacramento-San-Joaquin Delta is confirms the worst fears of this region’s vexing invisibility.

Environmental reporter Alex Breitler laid out reasons in his story:

“Many factors contribute to the Delta’s relative invisibility. Private levees hide many of the Delta’s 1,000 miles of waterways, the public has relatively little access to Delta islands, and the meandering nature of countless streams and sloughs west of Stockton makes it more difficult to identify with the Delta than, say, with one large body of water.”

And you pretty much have to own a boat. Still, the suspicion is the Delta is invisible in large part because the Valley in which it sprawls is invisible. That doesn’t bode well for the Delta or this region’s interests when the state water package finally comes before voters. 

So how do you raise this region’s profile? A question worth exploring.

There’s no way the Peripheral Canal measure — November’s $11 billion water bond — will pass now.

In part this is because public suport for pricey projects is dropping. In part because Gov. Brown’s priority is his tax increase. In part it is because legislators persuaded certain regions to swallow the water package by earmarking funds for their district — but when canal opponents point out how pork-laden the bill is, the public will reach for the barf bag.

That doesn’t mean this Nosferatu is dead. But he’s down for the next few years.

California Water Wars has more.

A skeptical reader, responding to today’s column, called to scoff at the notion that the Valley’s dirty air kills people.

Here’s a sign currently hanging in Sacramento’s airport.

The explanation certainly involves more than the air. But dismissing the Valley’s environmental problems is ostrich-sim.

The Assembly has passed legislation allowing voters to revise Three Strikes. Good news for Stockton.

The state’s ever-expanding prison system disproportionaltely burdens this city. Three strikes is at the core of this bloat. Even prosecutors have publicly said the law needs to be altered. Fewer peopl need to be put away for life. Judges need more discretion (it’s absurd to dany judges discretion).

Politicians lacked the courage to change the law, though, until the prison health care system foundered on the reef of federal intervention and receivership. Even know it’s a maybe. The law now goes to the state Sentate. Details here.

Cut its size, accellerate its construction and use cap and trade fees to fund it. Hmm. Being a Valley resident my first question is, “Cut who?”

Meanwhile an L.A. Times columnist says, “We might be better off running a zip line from Mt. Shasta to Mt. Baldy.”

Oliver O’Grady, the Hannibal Lecter of pedophiles, has been sentenced to three years in Irish prison following the discovery of child porn on his laptop, the news reports.

I remember when Ellie Nesler shot and killed her son’s accused molester, Daniel Driver, in 1993 in a Jamestown courtroom. Vigilnates who sought to justify the act said pedophiles always molest again. Therefore any punishment short of life imprisonment is insufficient. Since the criminal justice system didn’t intend to give Driver life imprisonment, his death was justified. 

I researched the facts. Pedophiles don’t always molest again. Some never offend again.

But O’Grady actually is the molester of popular imagination: A sociopath in sheep’s clothing, unable to curb his insatiable appetite for destroying innocent souls. May they lose the key.

The end of the line for redevelopment is tomorrow, Wednesday, Feb. 1. After that the city of Stockton’s ability to keep millions in property taxes for use cleaning up blight is kaput.

Belatedly, Cal Watch does an explainer.

Redevelopment had a checkered history in Stockton. It did a lot of nuts and bolts infrastructure upgrade; it also got grandiose and overspent on the arena. To pay for the arena’s cost overruns, then-City manager Mark Lewis took money from all Stockton’s redevelopment districts, leaving them broke. 

To placate neighborhood critics, who had been waiting for years for their redevelopment districts to produce money, then-Mayor Ed Chavez created the Strong Neighborhood Initiative. the city went in hock $100 million or so in bond debt to finance neighborhood improvements which redevelopment should have paid for in the first place.

Stockton is underfunded by governments at all levels. It deserved redevelopment money. But when it had that money, it overspent and created a back-breaking debt. The end of redevelopment means less money with which to renew Stockton. But also less rope with which to hang ourselves.