January 2025 Articles

City awaits Council’s next motion

By Rachel Williams

July 14.2024 (El Cajon) -- With online sales taking a bite out of retail traffic, shopping malls across the U.S. are struggling and some have closed down. Seeking to avoid that scenario, the City of El Cajon commissioned a market analysis envisioning redevelopment options for Parkway Plaza,  East County’s largest regional shopping mall.

Council members unanimously favored a motion to move beyond proposed aspirational measures and begin the next step toward transforming Parkway Plaza into a mix of residential, retail, offices, entertainment and community space.

These “Eatertainment” facilities would combine compelling, traditional dining options and immersive sport-centered bars with unique, dynamic lifestyle retail shops, all oriented around a linear park.

The biggest takeaway from this market analysis is that the community wants lower-cost products to provide the City of El Cajon with the most opportunity. Right now there isn’t a product representing this type of brand or environment.

"Parkway Plaza is grateful for the City of El Cajon’s interest and investment in the future of the shopping center. We are truly excited to see the city’s vision and look forward to the potential of working with them to continue evolving the property to meet the needs of our community,” Daisy Melena, General Manager of Parkway Plaza, said.

Hunden Partners, a leading advisor in destination real estate development, paired with 505 Design and conceptualized two plans for Parkway Plaza as an epicenter or heartbeat of the community; a place to work, play, visit and shop.

“You’re in that transition phase where if you let it go too long, it’s going to go in a direction you’re probably not too fond of, so it’s a great time to assess the situation and the opportunity,” Rob Hunden, Hunden Partners, said.(Photo, right)

The team aims to transform the dying mall from a stop-and-go destination with fast-food eateries and retail shops to an economic hub serving locals within 25 miles, catering to all residents. It’s a mixed-use, district-based design, including local multi-family properties, creative or medical offices, restaurants to attract families and outdoor space for community gatherings.

One redevelopment plan reduces the physical interior of the mall by 50% and reinvests 25% back. An alternative option would keep the existing mall but eliminate Walmart on the south side. Along Fletcher Pkwy, the reimagined blueprint shows a cluster of retail shops, and restaurants, introducing two hotels of 120-to-150 rooms aligning Highway 8.

By eliminating Walmart and repurposing one of the parking decks, a development of 300-to-350 residential units could provide shelter and create more than 1,500 blue-collar jobs during the construction process.

Okazaki pitches a second vision that concentrates the strongest tenants on one end, peeling back the mall to the center food court and reinventing its staple movie theater into an outdoor dining scene, with a smaller curated section of retail, restaurants or office spaces, and residential properties, creating symmetry and a unified destination.

“Once you start luring in lives and mixed-use amenities, all the sudden you start to shift the dynamic of what you can create and people start to visualize your property as something other than just a mall, then you start seeing a district,” Carl Okazaki with 505 Design said.

This alternative blueprint would keep Macy’s box, owned by Tourmaline Capital, and Sears’ box, owned by Citivest, utilizing it as a shell for another tenant. With dining on either end, an indoor concourse would head west to an outdoor pedestrian promenade,  anchoring those tenants under two ownership groups.

“You start the first phase. I don’t say that to be reckless or without a master plan. I don’t say that to be cavalier in the overall project, but time is money,” Councilmember Steve Goble said.

While Councilmember Michelle Metschel agrees the community needs to move forward expeditiously because she believes this project will improve the city overall, the residents are clamoring for more entertainment, restaurants, and a better spot to gather.

The reimagining of Parkway Plaza could provide more economic stability, and the number of jobs produced in the building of phases one and two is worth it, once it’s built, even more jobs will be created for the community. With these upgrades, Metschel anticipates crime reduction.

“We’re not gonna have to worry about getting more car dealerships in, and I think that we will keep our residents here if we have entertainment spots, venues that will keep the younger kids here once they get old enough to have families or out on their own,” she says.

Brenda Hammond, a meeting attendee and longtime resident of Lemon Grove, started going to Parkway Plaza, the center of El Cajon, in 1972. She’s hopeful this next generation will continue to gather at the mall for silly, fun times. 

“I was 12 years old. And we were so used to College Grove and Grossmont Center, we wanted something new to come down to East County, and we could just go down Avocado, we called it the back way, the old 94,” Hammond reminisced.

Once citizens reside on-site, services and products will follow suit, Goble called upon smaller landowners to seize the opportunity, pioneer and bring forward housing properties for the community.

Hunden says the number of residents in the multi-family property development is only a drop in the bucket relative to the number of residents who drive to visit the mall, but could generate frequent visits as opposed to once a month.

“I think we need to do something with that mall because it may end up like many other malls that become defunct and that’s one of our major sales-tax generators, and we don’t want that to happen,” Councilmember Gary Kendrick said.

Constraints from different landowners will need more financial analysis, according to Vince DiMaggio, the Assistant City Manager.   A big part of developing this further is sitting down with the stakeholders who own sections of the land, such as Starwood Capital Group, Tourmaline Capital, Citivest and JC Penny.

“There could be a short-term investment, maybe by the city, that then flips around and becomes a long-term benefit,” Hunden concludes.  “All of these properties are in a bit of a bind and they’re looking for a way out.”

This project is expected to have substantial economic benefits and increase the city’s revenues by at least $10 million yearly. However, certain material costs are needed for the residential section to ensure maximum quality assurance. Below shows that 45% of gap funding is needed to recapture the new net spending or taxes due for this project.

The reimagination of Parkway Plaza will be subsidized in the form of supportable private financing and gap funding. The City of El Cajon and the private sector, comprised of three entities, according to Hunden, would be responsible for figuring out the gap funding, likely implemented through land-use controls, zoning, and support from the Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District (EIFD) as a tool for this vision, DiMaggio said.


 

East County News Service

By Melinda Myers

Photo:  rain barrels can help manage the water on your property and provide water to use in your gardens.  Photo courtesy melindamyers.com

January 14, 2025 (San Diego’s East County) -- Each gardening season seems to offer new growing challenges. Our gardens are exposed to more drastic and variable weather with changing weather patterns. Floods, droughts, wind, temperature extremes, and unseasonable weather episodes can have immediate and long-term impacts on our plants.

Monitoring and noting these occurrences will help you diagnose immediate and future plant and garden problems.  It also reminds us to adjust plant maintenance when these stressors occur and watch for potential insect, disease, and plant decline that may appear in the future.

Create your own weather station with a rain gauge, snow gauge, and high-low thermometer. These gauges monitor the conditions in your backyard as opposed to those reported for nearby locations. Having information from your yard allows you to make any needed adjustments to watering and care to help your plants thrive.

Record significant weather extremes that can negatively impact plant health and longevity. Check with local nature centers, botanical gardens, and extension services for gardening calendars.  Many include information on significant weather events in your area.  You can then add your observations for future reference. Refer to this information as needed in the future to help diagnose plant problems that may result from these extremes.

Large trees and other established plantings are often overlooked when weather extremes occur. Extended dry periods, temperature extremes and flooding can stress and weaken these plants making them more susceptible to insect pests, diseases, and decline in the coming years. 

Always select plants suited to the growing conditions and start watching for those that appear to be more tolerant of extremes. Visit local public gardens and consult with your University Extension specialists and other plant experts when selecting new plants for your gardens.

Adapt your landscape maintenance and design to reduce the negative impact of flooding, drought, and temperature extremes.  Protect plant roots from temperature extremes with a layer of organic mulch. Incorporate organic matter into the soil to improve drainage and increase the water-holding ability of fast-draining soils. Cover the soil with plants and mulch to help protect the soil from compaction and erosion during heavy downpours.  Healthy soil is the key to growing plants that are better able to tolerate environmental stresses.

Manage water that falls on your property. Check with your local municipality for any restrictions or support for these efforts. Create rain gardens to capture, clean and direct rainfall to groundwater to help manage water where it falls. These also support pollinators and provide added beauty to your landscape. Enlist the help of rain barrels, if permitted, to capture rainwater to use on ornamental plantings and containers when needed.

Take this interest one step further and volunteer to be part of a network of volunteer weather watchers. The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) is a non-profit community-based network of volunteers that provides daily measurements of rain, hail, and snow that fall in their backyards.

The goal of the Network is to provide more localized weather information to scientists, researchers, resource managers, decision makers and more.  The data is used for natural resource, educational and research applications.

Weather watching is a great project for the family or classroom. It helps boost gardening success while increasing our awareness and knowledge of what’s happening around us.

Melinda Myers has written over 20 gardening books, including Midwest Gardener’s Handbook, Revised Edition, and Small Space Gardening. She hosts The Great Courses “How to Grow Anything” instant video and DVD series and the nationally syndicated Melinda’s Garden Moment radio program. Myers is a columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms magazine. Myers’ website is www.MelindaMyers.com.

By Fernanda Lopez Halvorson, County of San Diego Communications Office

Photo courtesy of the CDC

December 21, 2024 (San Diego) - County public health officials are warning San Diegans not to eat or drink raw milk products or give them to their pets because of the heightened risk for H5N1, or bird flu. 

By Wanjirũ Warama

Reviewed by Pennell Paugh

January 1, 2025 (La Mesa) -- Wanjiru Warama a resident of La Mesa, provides true stories of how her family and community lived in abject poverty on British colonial farms in Kenya in her novel, The Colonial Farm. Her historic memoir sheds light on the struggles of Kenyan farmworkers and rural populations under the British colonial rule. She then covers how Kenya’s rulership developed after the British retreated from governing.

Below is an excerpt from the novel:

“Before colonization, Kenya had no plantations for children to work in and earn money. People lived in clusters of extended families and worked only on their own lands unless friends did merry-go-rounds at each other’s projects. Without full-time jobs elsewhere, parents did most of the hard work and eased their children into work without burdening them unduly.

“But during my time, in the fifties and sixties, our parents needed us children to help them not only garden and harvest but also earn extra money. “Hard work killed nobody,” they said. Discipline (a euphemism for beating or assaulting a child) and work, the village culture claimed, molded a child into a responsible human being. Or the Christians evoked “Spare the rod, spoil the child” nonsense.

“Later in my adulthood, I heard an occasional misguided adult say, “My parents beat me, and look at me now? I turned out okay.” I bet people make such statements to make light of the assaults and damage they suffered.

“Regarding child labor, one would expect that because Kenya was a British colony, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), also known as child labor laws enacted in England in 1938, would apply. But the law applied to British children, not African children in the colonies like us. Our parents didn’t know of such laws; individual parents set the standards. Major Miller, like the rest, employed children as young as ten.

“My siblings and I complained about the hard work, but the hardest hit were the unlucky children whose fathers couldn’t afford school fees (at twenty-two shillings per pupil per year from 1956) or didn’t see the need for educating potential farmhands. The children worked full-time. They dug, weeded, and picked coffee cherries alongside their parents or other adults eight to nine hours a day, six days a week. Some landowners, like the famous author of Out of Africa, Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen, 1885-1962), besides plantation jobs, employed small boys as domestic trainees.”

Warama shows the lives of overworked native groups while describing the lives of her family members, including herself. Despite the odds of an African living in 1950s Kenya, where education for a girl was an afterthought, Warama managed to use education to escape a life of drudgery.

The book is astonishingly positive given the abject poverty under which Warama and her siblings suffered. She tells a compelling story. I look forward to reading the author’s personal story—how she continued her education and eventually immigrated to the United States.

Author Wanjiru Warama has written five books and one personal essay. The Colonial Farm is the latest in her The Colonized series. A philanthropist, Warama is a member of The Rotary Club, a lifetime member of the Friends of the San Diego Public Library, and a benefactor of Gitura Secondary and Gitura Primary schools in Kenya.

East County News Service

January 16, 2025 (El Cajon)-- In honor of Valentine's Day, the Saps at Sea Laurel & Hardy club presents: Laurel & Hardy – Romantic Leads??  Films include "Should Married Men Go Home?", "Our Wife", and "Yes, Yes Nannette." 

The event takes place on Saturday, February 1, from 4:30 to 8 p.m. at First Lutheran Church of El Cajon, 867 S Lincoln Ave, El Cajon, CA 92020. 

Admission is $10 and includes dessert.  Children 12 and under are free.  Movie-related books will be available for sale.

Doors open at 4:30 p.m.; the program starts at 5 p.m.

For more information,visit the Saps At Sea - San Diego Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/groups/111118255744315

East County News Service

Image: Creative Commons via Bing

January 23, 2025 (San Diego) - A woman, along with an incarcerated person, have been arrested on suspicion of mailing drug-laced letters to a San Diego County jail, says Sergeant Aaron Brooks with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Detention Investigations Unit.

Deputies assigned to the Sheriff's Mail Processing Center intercepted fictitious legal mail intended for Aaron Beek, 45, who is in custody at the George Bailey Detention Facility in Otay Mesa. Upon closer inspection, deputies located materials they believed to be soaked with narcotics. 

The Sheriff's Detention Investigations Unit (DIU) began a criminal investigation, which identified Jacqueline Richardson, 44, as responsible for mailing the packages containing the drugs to Beek at the George Bailey Detention Facility.

On January 16, DIU Detectives served a search warrant at Richardson's home in San Diego. During the search, detectives found evidence related to the mail case and additional narcotics such as powdered fentanyl, M30 fentanyl pills and methamphetamine.

Richardson was arrested on numerous charges, including sending a controlled substance into jail and possession of a controlled substance. She was booked into the Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility in Santee. 

Beek, who remains in Sheriff's custody, was rearrested on criminal charges related to sending a controlled substance into jail.

Sending a controlled substance into a jail is a felony with a penalty of up to six years in custody.