Now that 2013 is in the rear-view mirror, community activists in Point Loma and Ocean Beach are looking forward to the new year and anticipating what 2014 may bring in terms of wish lists and more solid goals.
Here are a few thoughts by prominent coastal residents who offered up their visions of what they’d like to see happen in the new year.
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Nicole Burgess, a cycling advocate and activist who serves as secretary of the Peninsula Community Planning Board (PCPB), not unsurprisingly had her favorite mode of travel in mind when presenting her 2014 wish list when she said, “Let’s talk bikes: Ciclosdias in PB — March 9; Bike share coming to downtown and the Peninsula soon; BikeSD endorses David Alvarez; myself and many students will be on Nimitz (Boulevard) and Centraloma at 8 a.m. next week.”
Burgess said she’d also like to see “opportunities to make our neighborhoods safer, more beautiful and more enjoyable. There’s an opportunity at OB Elementary to create an absolutely beautiful and more effective type of crosswalk rather than the current proposed one.”
Regarding the media, Burgess said, “On a broader idea, I always like opinion pages and short stories on individuals/groups that are making a positive contribution to their neighborhoods.”
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Norm Allenby, one of Burgess’s colleagues on the Peninsula Community Planning Board and a retired civil trial lawyer, was thinking about the environment when formulating his 2014 wish list.
“We draw down our aquifers with no thought of refilling them,” he said. “We don’t harvest our rainfall, but sluice it to the ocean. We import our water, largely use it once, pollute it, sort of clean it up and pump it to the ocean. We have created a freshwater spring at the end of Point Loma supported by an underwater stream, aka, our sewer system. That spring discharges 150 million gallons of water a day, close to the amount of water we import daily.”
Better yet, said Allenby, “We can retain that water, cleanse it and reuse it on site where it was first created, greatly reducing our need for imported water. Were we to require in all future construction that a building have its own water plan, including rain harvesting and onsite recycling in closed systems, we would retain water in our watersheds, make rain (evaporation), grow trees, not drain our aquifers, and use the abundance of water we have. We could then retrofit by retrofit in existing structures create water plans that would allow them to become less water independent on imported water.”