I just called City Attorney Mike Aguirre to get his thoughts on the California Supreme Court ruling yesterday on the ongoing seals v. citizens saga at the Children’s Pool beach in La Jolla, and he gave me a few more tidbits to chew on.
Most interesting were his comments about his office’s crusade to clean up the city’s smoke shops. He said it’s aimed at paraphernalia for smoking meth and crack, not marijuana.
“The paraphernalia that goes for rock cocaine and methamphetamine is a lot different than paraphernalia that goes for pot,” he said. “If you look at some of the kits that are being used, you’ll see what I’m saying.”
He said that “various investigative things,” in cooperation with the San Diego Police Department will be done around the first of the year.
“I can’t allow the shops to become so interconnected with methamphetamine and rock cocaine like they are. I just can’t look the other way on that,” he said. “The marijuana is not of concern to me. That’s not our focus at all.”
Perhaps the smoke shop owners can inhale more easily now. Aguirre expressed interest in working with them.
As for Children’s Pool, an appellate court in September upheld a lower-court ruling ordering the city to dredge Children’s Pool, clean up all the seal poop in the water and restore the beach to the way it was about 70 years ago. The city appealed to the state Supreme Court for help but was denied.
The battle, of course, is between folks who want the now-contaminated pool made safe for swimmers and folks who want to let a colony of seals keep the pool and the beach for themselves. The seals have established the beach as a haul-spot and breeding ground.
Aguirre says the only recourse now for the city, which is trying to get out of the costly order of having to dredge the pool, is to convince the state—which gave the beach to the city in 1931 under an agreement that requires the city to keep the beach and pool human-friendly—to take the beach back, perhaps quashing the agreement. “There’s no way the city of San Diego can assume that financial responsibility,” he said.
Finally, Aguirre said he’ll appeal to respected journalist Bill Moyers in his campaign to spread the word about how crappy KPBS is at producing public-affairs television. The station spent “over 10-and-a-half million dollars to build a production studio to produce local programming. Now they produce one television show. That’s it.”
Aguirre has been widely criticized for demanding documents from KPBS, under the state Public Records Act, pertaining to why it canceled the show Full Focus and how it picks guests for the radio show Editors Roundtable, which is broadcast on TV some weeks on Cox Channel 4. Critics have blasted him for using government resources to bully a media organization. Aguirre has said he wants to know more about the Union-Tribune’s influence over KPBS’ programming decisions.
“We don’t want to do anything that raises the First Amendment thing, so we have to regroup and come at it again,” he said. But “why was all that money raised if they weren’t going to follow through with local programming?
“We’re going to try to hook up with this thing nationally, because this is a national problem” outside of places like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston, Aguirre said.
Bill Moyers in recent years has been critical of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s influence over PBS programming.
