Friday, November 18, 2011

strategic gluttony for the win


Just because I'm 367 miles from Pomona doesn't mean I've changed my reading habits. And that includes the pseudo-blog (pseudo because it's actually professional, unlike any blog I've ever been involved with) LA Observed. And today's LA Observed points us to an amazing work of, yes, scholarship:

Sarah at The Delicious Life made a spreadsheet of all of Jonathan Gold's Essential 99 annual columns. It is a thing of wonderment.

Now, I realize that not all of y'all can get outside of our little corner of the West Inland Empire very often, and not all of y'all are big foodies, but surely some of you are and will appreciate this -- or maybe even make use of it. Pasadena is fairly well represented on the list, and most everyone I know ends up having to go to Pasadena at some point.

(BTW, I'll point out that one of the restaurants booted from the Essential 99 list, Zelo Pizza in Arcadia, is just as good as it always was. Meg-Bob and K-Bob say, Check it out!)

7 comments:

John Clifford said...

Terrific resource. Thanks for continuing to think of us here in li'l ol' P-town.

Anonymous said...

I live in district one and I sure would like to be in the Philips Ranch district. Their part of the city is much cleaner and neater than the rest of Pomona. Thay must be doing something right or they have friends in high places.

John Clifford said...

Actually, Phillips Ranch has imposed upon itself a special assessment district (the lighting and landscaping district). That means that they have banded together and imposed an additional tax on their portion of the city to be used only in their area and only for lighting and landscaping. That means that they have additional funds for upkeep of the parkways, hillsides, and the street lights.

Now if you could get your neighborhood to go along with it, you could always opt to raise your own taxes. A VERY hard sell in today's environment.

Anonymous said...

Better Idea. Just enforce all the codes that already exist.

John Clifford said...

Oh, you mean those 6 code enforcement officers who have to deal with a city of 150,000? I'm not sure how you got to code enforcement from your comments about how nice Phillips Ranch looks compared to some other parts of the city, but it's not code enforcement. You're seeing the results of the extra taxes they pay for landscaping and lighting. They get the same code enforcement as the rest of the city.

Now if your argument is that perhaps the PR people are cleaner than the rest of the city or that they are more law-abiding than the rest of the city . . . that goes to a whole different area of argument.

Yes, codes should be enforced, but nobody wants to pay for more code cops or for any other civic services. Until that changes, I don't see what we can do. Perhaps you have an idea? If so, I'm sure everyone would like to know as we're all interested in a clean, safe city.

Anonymous said...

That's about 2400hrs a year. How about each officer taking one street at a time and working only on front yard violations and while their doing this they can stop the people who are pushing shopping carts and explaining the code to them. Objectives can be met if goals are set. Yes it's hard work but that's what we pay for.

John Clifford said...

So we shouldn't even try to be reactive and respond to resident's complaints? AND we shouldn't be looking at things like illegal construction, people living in garages? etc.? The current code enforcement is doing the best they can do responding to citizen complaints. I don't think that this kind of "policing" would help the situation at all.

What we need it to:
1) as a citizenry decide we don't want the conditions we find ourselves in, and
2) decide what we can do about it. If that means more code enforcement, then we need to be willing to pay for it.