Clarity Blog

Hoooooooooooover! Hot Dam!

Seventy-five years ago today under a 102-degree sun, President Roosevelt dedicated Hoover Dam.  Former president Hoover was not invited to the ceremony.  Since then, the dam’s 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete have controlled flooding, generated untold megawatts of power, and helped manage water supply in the West.   The birthday did not go unnoticed by the media – first sensational stories about how the drought might end Hoover’s power production soon (later clarified when someone realized water could be released from upstream dams), and eventually articles giving a great dam its due.

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If you have been following Ford’s Fiesta Movement—the social media campaign for its new subcompact—you’ll know that Ford takes Twitter and Facebook very seriously.  How seriously was something I found out last week when I tweeted that I want to test drive a Ford Fiesta to see how it compared to my MINI Cooper.  Within minutes I had a response from Ford’s branding president Sam De La Garza (@samdelag). (more…)

What were the three biggest California land development stories of the past seven days?  Well, the news-heads and policy wonks here at Laer Pearce & Associates have compiled them for you here.  You’ll find the Big Three here, or you can follow LPAWater on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news and analysis. You can also sign up to receive the Weekly 3 via email here. This week:

Totally Cool About Climate Change

UCLA economist Matthew Kahn thinks global warming is the real deal, and he’s really cool with it. “There is a lot of evidence that we can cope with change, that we are not mice, and we have big brains,” he told the LA Times, stating what we’ve always thought was obvious.  As for California’s water woes in a hotter world, he’s once again positive … in a way:  ”Climate change may force us to get rid of our crazy outdated [water] laws,” he said.  Looks like good times ahead for water lawyers!

Read the L.A. Times interview here

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Laer will be giving a media training presentation to a professional association next week. As part of that presentation, we are including a slide on today’s media climate. We made one back in 2006 for a similar presentation and decided to start there. We all knew back in 2006 the power that the internet had to get information out. But what we couldn’t predict was how much the media landscape would change—and how quickly.

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What were the three biggest California land development stories of the past seven days?  Well, the news-heads and policy wonks here at Laer Pearce & Associates have compiled them for you here.  You’ll find the Big Three here, or you can follow LPALand on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news and analysis. You can also sign up to receive the Weekly 3 via email here. This week:

Red Tape…Fuggedaboudit

It’s a rare day when California can learn something from the state of New Jersey.  We’ll take the California shore over Jersey’s version any day, but Californians should be paying attention to what New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is up to.  The state’s newly elected leader is proposing the merger or elimination of nearly 300 boards and commissions – including many inactive or defunct groups created years ago, and some that have never met at all.  Sacramento, are you listening?

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What were the three biggest California water stories of the past seven days?  Well, the news-heads and policy wonks here at Laer Pearce & Associates have compiled them for you here.  You’ll find the Big Three here every Thursday, or you can follow LPAWater on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news and analysis. You can also sign up to receive the Weekly 3 via email here. This week:

Images of that little Dutch boy …

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this week said levees in the Sacramento Delta towns of Stockton, Marysville and Lathrop are “unacceptable,” which means they’re vulnerable to failure, and if they fail, the towns can forget about receiving federal repair funds. Sacramento levees also flunked, but the city got a pass on the fund ban.  Levees were dinged for trees and other “structural intrusions,” erosion, cracking, and myriad other flaws evidenced throughout the Delta levee system.  The economic impact of a collapse of the Delta levees, BTW, is $40 billion.  It’s time for a fix!

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We’re all very proud of Beth Pearce, our CFO, today.  Her life-saving work alerting parents and kids to the dangers of designer drugs was just profiled via a lengthy interview at one of the most popular “mommy blogs,” MomLogic.

Beth took it upon herself to make two “Voice of the Victims” films a few years back when she was touched by a story in the OC Register about Erin Rose, a beautiful young girl who suffered terrible, permanent brain damage after taking the designer drug Ketamine.  She went on to learn a lot – not just about Ketamine, ecstasy and GHB, but also how to shoot, edit and produce a film.  She listened as the parents and friends of four children, Erin Rose and three beautiful young people who died after taking Ecstasy, told their stories of shock, grief, pain … and a strong resolve to spare others from what they went through.

It’s an amazing work, and it’s saved a lot of lives – but don’t take it from us.  Read it in Beth’s own words at MomLogic.

By the way, Beth isn’t just our CFO.  She’s Laer’s wife and Lauren’s mom.  We may be the firm that does important work for important clients … but we’re just a mom and pop shop at heart.

What were the three biggest California water stories of the past seven days?  Well, the news-heads and policy wonks here at Laer Pearce & Associates have compiled them for you here.  You’ll find the Big Three here every Thursday, or you can follow LPAWater on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news and analysis. You can also sign up to receive the Weekly 3 via email here. This week:

Cleaning up Sacramento

It’s an old trick – bury a story by releasing it late Friday before a holiday – but it didn’t work, as the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board’s much too delayed dealing with the Sacramento County Regional Sanitation District still got noticed.  Ammonia from Sacramento’s sewage pollutes the Delta, contributing to declining fish populations, yet the goop and poop get only primitive primary treatment.   The order sets change in motion, but expect Sacramento to fight it or ask the rest of the state to pay to clean up their … problem.

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What are the three biggest stories each week in the world of California land development?  You’ll find them right here, or follow LP&A all week long on Twitter at @LPALand for up-to-the-minute news and analysis.  You can also sign up to receive the Weekly 3 via email here. This week:

Someone’s glass is half full.  Of what, we’re not sure.

If you’re like us, you’ve seen so many conflicting homebuilding forecasts in recent months that your head is spinning.  We know there are still many bears out there, but we wanted to share a recent report from CalPoly Pomona’s Real Estate Research Council, which gives us at least a glimmer of hope. The report anticipates that because of current dreary numbers, California homebuilding could rise as much as 246 percent in the next 18 months.  In an accompanying reader poll, 80 percent responded “What are they smoking?”

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Filthy parasites?

In case you missed the news, three people at the Discovery Channel headquarters were held hostage today by James Lee, a madman who had “beef” with the network. Unlike the typical disgruntled former employee hostage-taker, Lee was a crazed uber-environmentalist who felt the Discovery Channel isn’t living up to what he saw as its responsibility to save the planet.

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