This is just a tiny example of the kind of results we can create in our communities. It was even easier and more fun than it looks.  Check Out The Video.  Thanks again to all our collaborators, it wouldn’t have been as easy or as much fun without you.

Thanks to Thirty Miles of Corruption for sharing the documentation related to the State’s reply to the City’s redevelopment loans.

Wasn’t it Gandhi who said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”.  Fear of the unknown is no reason to avoid it. The past, no matter how successful it may have been, is no guarantee of the future. The overwhelming majority of my neighbors see Sustainability and Economic Development in the same context. If either is out of balance, quality of life and health are impacted.

A Sustainability Commission is an obvious and appropriate first step to take if we are to have either and live long and well enough to enjoy them.

Painting the issue as “trendy buzzwords” and “feel good symbolism” demonstrates a serious misrepresentation of the issues at hand and is a disservice to the the over 100 participants at the Green Action Summit, many of whom have been at work on this for 30 years or more. Sort of like the little old ladies who wanted to save the Santa Ana River. They laughed at them too.

New post on TMC: Thirty Miles of Corruption

Watch the Video

The University Neighborhood Green Team celebrates Earth Day 2012. We went from this . . .

It was even easier than it looks. A neighbor’s idea, a few phone calls,  three hours of fun and, welcome to the University Neighborhood.

Monthly meetings are the second Thursday each month at Crest Community Church. Stop by and share your idea.

Thank you Keep Riverside Clean and Beautiful for adding a public median as part of your “Adopt a Street” program. Video soon.

Thank you to Jeff Smith at Riverside Public Works for support and saving us hours of extra work.

Thank you to Andy at Nursery & Rock Supply in Perris for saying “yes” and supplying the river rock.

Thank you to Johnathan Semper and the Riverside County Master Gardeners.

Thank you to Pamela Pavela of Western Municipal Water District for their water friendly program.

Thank you to the Jurupa Mountain Discover Center for specializing in drought tolerant plants and sharing the fruits of your propagation program with us.

Thank you to Crest Community Church for giving us a place to meet, partnership and home to a bountiful community garden in the near future.

Over 3,000 Comcast employees, along with family members, students, and parents will descend on 14 California schools impacted by recent budget cuts on Saturday. Volunteers will provide much needed “makeovers” to schools who have suffered from lack of funding by spending the day planting shrubs, repainting walls, building picnic tables, repairing fences, weeding flower beds, power washing buildings and equipment and landscaping.

Their efforts are part of National Comcast Cares Day, in which 55,000 employees across the nation step up to provide much needed services, making it the largest corporate volunteer effort in the country. Comcast Cares day also coincides with Global Youth Service day this year. 

Schools that will be “made over” this week include Washington Elementary in Alameda, Livermore Valley Charter School, Arboga Elementary in Marysville, Our Lady of Mercy in Merced, Modesto’s Garrison Elementary, Britton Middle School in Morgan Hill, Olinda Elementary in Richmond, Ethel I. Baker Elementary in Sacramento, Rancho Cielo School in Salinas, Thurgood Marshall High School in San Francisco, San Geronimo’s Lagunitas School, Toyon Elementary of San Jose, Fesler Junior High of Santa Maria, and Madrone Elementary in Santa Rosa. 

Curt Henninger, Regional Senior Vice President for Comcast California, said, “Comcast Cares Day is part of our ongoing commitment to education and to improving the quality of life in the neighborhoods where we live and work.”

Comcast Corporation is one of the largest entertainment and communications companies in the United States.  In addition to Comcast Cares national day of service, employees volunteer their time year-round to a variety of projects and organizations.

With the end of California Redevelopment December 29, 2011, cities are scrambling to grab assets and minimize their losses.  As one reads in the news, Governor Brown stole our money and we are left with a mess.  I don’t know about other cities, but I can tell you that Riverside created their own mess.

Riverside has a long history of borrowing monies from our own local utility funds, they are the cash cows for cities.  When the Hudson regime was crowned by Mayor Loveridge, Ed Adkinson, Frank Schivaone, Dom Betro, etc. this borrowing became exponential.

The sewer, electric and water fund operate as an enterprise fund, essentially they are set up to make a profit.  This profit is supposed to be used for maintenance, repairs, and operations, in the case of the sewer fund no new construction is allowed.  The profit is saved for a rainy day and used to maintain our infrastructure.  Well here comes FRED (Frank and Ed), Mayor Loveridge and a city manager willing to take our city into the deep dark hallows of debt.  The borrowing frenzy began, funding pet projects, redevelopment activities, and favored developers was on.

The parking fund was born and we immediately borrowed 5 million from the sewer fund.  This was the birth of the parking meters.  One million dollars of the sewer fund went to the parking meters and the other four million went to fund the Taj Mahal, Orange Street parking garage.  Well, this was easy, no one noticed, so let’s see what else we can spend sewer monies on.

We have a developer who would like to build some luxury townhouse/condos (Raincross Promenade).  Sewer fund monies again, the victim of greed and mismanagement.  The city spent approximately 15 million dollars to assemble properties, demolitions, relocation, etc. Sewer fund 0, developer 15 million.  There is a catch here.

The city charter states that we can make inter-fund (between electric, water and sewer) loans, no mention of inter-agency (redevelopment is a separate legal agency) loans.  Fast forward 2010.  Over 21 million dollars was loaned out of the sewer fund to the City of Riverside Redevelopment Agency.  One loan did not even have a contract in place so that the sewer fund would be able to be paid back.  Who would have known that the first thing Governor Brown would do when taking office would be to end redevelopment.  Oops.

AB 126 passed,the court upheld this ruling and now we must comply.  What does that mean for the sewer monies and the monies from all of the enterprise funds, sewer included. Bye Bye.  The ruling states that these loans are unenforceable, sewer fund 0, redevelopment agency and the State of California 21 million.  When you hear city leaders complain that the State of California is taking our money, our city leaders should have had the ethical and intellectual understanding to have not made illegal loans in the first place.  Taxpayers 0, Sewer fund 0, Renaissance 21 million.

Please view the article link.

http://www.pe.com/local-news/politics/jim-miller-headlines/20120330-redevelopment-shutdown-process-is-a-new-frontier.ece

TMC, RATED RIVERSIDE’S MOST “SLANDEROUS” AND MEZZSPELLED, “MISSPELLED” AND “OPINIONATED” BLOG SITE!   TMC IS NOW EXCLUSIVELY ON FILE WITH THE COUNTY OF RIVERSIDE’S DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, AND PROSSIBLY POSSIBLY ON FILE WITH THE CITY OF RIVERSIDE’S POTENTIAL SLAPP SUIT LIST… WE WILL HAVE TO ASK GREGORY ABOUT THAT ONE… AGAIN, THANK-YOU COMMUNITY OF RIVERSIDE AND THE CITY OF RIVERSIDE EMPLOYEE’S FOR YOUR SUPPORT!  COMMENTS ALWAYS WELCOMED, ESPECIALLY SPELL CHECKERS!  EMAIL ANONYMOUSLY WITH YOUR DIRT OR FOR CONTACT!   THIRTYMILESCORRUPTION@HOTMAIL.COM 

Richard Block, a Riverside Hills member, said concerns ranging from the tons of dirt that will be hauled away from the project to the squealing of train wheels are unresolved.

“The evidence presented in the environmental process clearly shows the project will have negative impacts,” Block said. “And they are either incompetent to them or ignoring them.”

He also said officials are grossly overestimating the line’s ridership, noting that the 4,300 daily riders estimated in the report would exceed the ridership of existing Metrolink service in Riverside County. Ridership along the entire 91 Line from Riverside to Union Station in Los Angeles was 5,161 in June, according to Metrolink.

Read more

Thanks to NPR’s food blog, The Salt.

Spring means cherry, pear and apple blossoms. But in many metropolitan areas, urban foresters ensure those flowering fruit trees don’t bear fruit to keep fallen fruit from being trampled into slippery sidewalk jelly.

But a group of fruit fans in the San Francisco Bay Area is secretly grafting fruit-bearing tree limbs onto those fruitless trees.

I visited the “crime scene” one recent day, but I can’t tell you where it is because I was with the “criminals.”

“If we say where it is, they could come after me,” says Tara Hui, a fruit tree grafter. She’s talking about city officials, who manage the trees and say it’s illegal to have fruit trees on sidewalks.

So let’s just say we’re in some Bay Area city in a working-class neighborhood, at a line of pear trees that bear no pears.

Hui and two assistants pull out a knife, reach into a plastic bag filled with twigs no bigger than your pinkie, and cut from a fruit bearing pear tree. She says it’s an Asian pear, and that she’s grafting it onto a flowering pear tree.

They whittle a wedge into one end of their twig, then cut a groove into a similar-sized twig on the city tree. They join the two, like tongue and groove carpenters. And when their grafted twig eventually grows into a branch.

“There will be a much better looking tree that actually will provide fruit for people that come by,” Hui says.

Hui’s motives to break the law are straightforward.

“We don’t have a supermarket and we have very few produce stores [here],” she says. “What better to alleviate scarcity of healthy produce in an impoverished area than to grow them yourself and to have it available for free.”

Carla Short, an urban forester for the San Francisco Department of Public Works who’s in charge of 103,000 public trees, has a different view of fruit trees.

“It gets very dangerous very quickly,” Short says. “I mean the minute that fruit gets crushed on the sidewalk, it is slippery. We certainly don’t want people to get injured.”

She says fruit isn’t forbidden everywhere, and the local government does encourage them in community gardens.

But that does put the city forester in an awkward position — advocating for publicly available fruit trees, but policing guerrilla grafters. Short says her team is looking for the guerrilla grafters but hasn’t found them yet.

And what will they do if they find them? First, try to reason with the grafters, she says.

Meanwhile, Hui imagines these same streets in the coming years.

“Just taking an evening stroll, and then you see a fruit and you reach over and now you’re nourished,” says Hui.

So far, officials have yet to discover which of the city’s decorative trees will become delicious trees because the grafts aren’t yet old enough to bear fruit.